Recap of Events

Starting from the beginning, Alasdair Haeden was born on Monday evening healthy (seemingly, at any rate) at 7lbs 13ozm 20in long. After about 20 hours Mom and baby were discharged from Providence Everett and we all headed home on Tuesday afternoon. Alasdair though, was sleeping a lot more than a newborn should and was spitting up more than he should be given that he wasn't eating anything. He hadn't shown any interest in eating since Monday overnite. There are plenty of pictures of his first two days or so here.

On Wednesday morning his vomit was beginning to turn yellow and bilious so Jess brought him in to the pediatrician's office. He was very concerned and advised us to bring him back to Providence if his condition did not change during the next six hours or so. It didn't so Jess brought him in the Providence emergency room and he was poked and prodded etc. They ultimately decided that there was no one on staff expert enough to treat him so they ambulanced down to Children's Hospital and was admitted to the NICU around 10:30 pm on Wednesday.

The team of doctors there were troubled with his condition. His vomit had turned very green by this time and his abdomen was distended and causing him pain. They put him on a morphine drip, antibiotics, and a basic sugar/electrolyte solution (I'm pretty sure it was just Gatorade, looked like it at any rate). They then administered an upper G-I barium contrast x-ray. Then they came and talked to us about possible causes, they wanted to check for/eliminate the conditions associated with his array of symptoms. They were most concerned about an intestinal malrotation. If not treated within hours it may severely impair his ability to survive or lead a normal life. Based on the x-ray results, which did not look normal, but not terrible either they wanted our permission to do exploratory surgery, which we granted. They operated right away while Jess and I pretended to be trying to get some sleep.

They called us back around 2:30am with the news that a malrotation was not the cause of his distress. Thank goodness. Alasdair now boasts a three inch scar across the right side of his abdomen where they pulled out his intestines and much of his colon and found that it all looked fine. But the cause of his worry was still to be discovered. It was then that they narrowed it down to either an infection (so they had immediately amplified him to broadspectrum antibiotics) or something they began to tell us about called Hirschsprung's disease.

Basically, Hirschsprung's occurs when the intestinal nervous system does not develop completely down the colon and prevents the normal development of the digestive system's ability to pass food and waste. There is more information about it here and here. They let him and us rest for the remainder of the evening.

The next morning they did a biopsy of his lower colon in order to detect a possible absence of the normal ganglion neurons and/or hypertrophy of the muscle tissue. Then the next day (Friday morning) they did another x-ray, another contrast using barium, this time administered to his tail end via enema to trace his lower colon and rectum. Both results came back late Friday evening, Aladair does have Hirschsprung's disease.

It is very low along his tract, which is why it was not detected during his initial exploratory surgery. At this point he is scheduled for the necessary operation on Monday morning, they will do the full pull-down procedure at that time, he will not require a stoma (which would mean follow up surgery and a much longer hospital stay). We are expecting a complete recovery and hopefully he won't need to stay for more than a few more days into next week.

Jess has been staying with him at Children's throughout the ordeal, while I've been mostly here with the girls, visiting the hospital when I can. She says that this morning they took him off his continuous morphine drip, so he's awake now and we're able to see his eyeballs again.

Please keep us all in your prayers and hopefully I can begin to update the site with some more reassuring photos soon. We're certainly anxious to bring things back to normal.
Thank you all for your support,