Gus’s Health
Two days ago we gave birth to a new baby, Augustine Michael LeBlanc, or Gus, as we’re calling him. And when I say “We gave birth”, I mean Sherry gave birth and I watched and paced nervously.Actually the birth itself was like a scene from The French Connection, and I’ll tell that story another day.
Right now, I’d like to talk about Gus’s health.
Gus has esophageal atresia. This means that instead of his esophagus connecting to his stomach, it ends in a little pouch. It’s a random birth defect. Apparently it isn’t genetic, but nobody knows what causes it. It’s very rare. But most importantly, it’s almost never life threatening.
(More info can be found here)
Fortunately for us, we already knew about all this. Gus’s stomach wasn’t showing up in his 20-week ultrasound, so they had a follow-up ultrasound. Nothing there either. Then they had an MRI, and that’s where we found out for sure.
There are three common types of EA. I’ll spare you the names and just say that one of them is very easy to fix, one of them is fairly easy to fix, and one of them is tricky to fix. They could tell Gus didn’t have the very easy one, but the fairly easy one is by far the most common, and the tricky one is way less so.
We wouldn’t know one way or the other until they could take a look after birth, so we had been assuming we were going to have the fairly easy one to fix. In this case, the two ends of the esophagus are fairly close to each other, and it’s pretty straightforward to connect them. It would be a quick surgery, and we’d be out of the hospital in a week.
Well, as it happened, we have the tricky one. Type A for those of you keeping score at home. The reason it’s tricky is because the two ends are far apart. In Gus’s case, they’re over 4 cm apart, or about an inch and a half. This isn’t the longest anyone’s heard of, but it’s a very long way apart.
Our pediatric surgeon has taken his once-a-year vacation this weekend (Good timing on our part!) So we won’t know what the final treatment is going to be until he’s had a chance to take a look at the X-rays. But in the meantime, they’re going to want him to grow a bit, so hopefully his esophagus ends get longer and make it easier to connect them together.
They’ve installed a feeding tube straight into his stomach and they’re going to try to get him plenty of Mom’s milk. They’ll start slow, since his stomach has never had anything in it, so it’s about the size of a pea right now. And they installed a very intense-looking IV to get home lots of nutrition. And also, since there’s nowhere for his phlegm and saliva to go, they’ve got yet another tube into the end of his upper esophagus to vacuum all that out.
So any pictures of Gus you see, he’ll have a bunch of tubes and hoses sticking out of him. That’s the story with that.
If there is any good news here, it’s that esophageal atresia is often associated with a bunch of other birth defects. As far as we know, now, we don’t have any of them. I was particularly worried about “imperforate anus”, whatever that is. And, as I mentioned, this is not life-threatening.
I know of all the problems we could have, this one isn’t so bad at all. But it’s still a problem.
So I guess my point is, if you’re the religious sort, please keep us in your prayers. If you’re not the religious sort but spiritual, try to send some positive energy this way. And if you’re neither religious nor spiritual, I dunno. Keep us in your thoughts.
