We Love you Jonah

Words can not express how I feel. Nor can I truly express my appreciation for the love and support we have received from our family and friends as well as the doctors, nurses and staff both here in Madison and in Cincinnati. It has been a long journey but at no time have we felt like we have been walking it alone. It gives me no comfort to share this, knowing the feelings it will invoke in whomever reads it. I could see it in the reactions of the people in the Perinatal center that we have gotten to know, and in the tone and behavior of the nurses. Jonah is now facing the gestational equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen.

The news we got today was extremely difficult to take even though it was obvious on the ultrasound what was going on. It would appear, from the images, that Jonah is in end-stage renal failure and what little fluid was being generated has dwindled to either no fluid or close to it. Dialysis can not reliable be effective until an infant is eight - nine pounds. Right now he is about four pounds. Even at 41 weeks, Evan barely topped seven.

Secondly, and more importantly, he has a significant case of pulmonary hypoplasia. That means that the heart is taking up a significant portion of the chest cavity. That can only really only mean one thing; the lungs are not developing like they should. When we asked the high risk OB what the prospects of this reversing were, he clasped his hands together and paused to form the sentence "the outlook is these cases in poor." It will all come down to what they can not measure, which is lung function. It also means that they can not do anything now to help him; we will have to wait until he is born to find the truth in what all of this means. It also means the chances of him surviving are not good.

We were supposed to meet with the neonatogist and the pediatric urologist tomorrow but we requested that it happen tonight, and we are supposed to meet with them around 7:30. We should get some more answers about his chances but I would not expect that they are any different that what we heard today. Just filling in the blanks and making sure that we can make a good decision about when to give birth and what comfort is given to him.

As you may expect, we need a little time on our own right now to deal with this. We will find out more tonight about how long Kelly will stay in the hospital and what fetal monitoring should take place. I will keep everyone updated here, but we will need some space to process what happened today and we will let everyone know our plans for our little boy.

With Love,

John and Kelly