It’s been awhile since I’ve been here, but a lot has happened. First of all, I spent my very first Holy Week and Easter here in this hospital. Secondly, I am now two weeks and three days old! Lastly, I got pretty sick over the weekend.

Getting that sick was sure scary—especially for my mommy and daddy and the rest of my family. The doctors didn’t know exactly why I got so sick. At first they thought I got a virus in my lungs, but then they decided it was because my lungs just weren’t working right. The doctors said that while I was in my protective uterine coating, my tummy thing was like a basketball pressing against my chest. There I was: folded in the regular fetal position with this giant tummy thing pressing against my lungs. While the tummy thing was pressing against my lungs, my lungs didn’t do what they were supposed to do while they were being developed, so when I was born and started breathing on my own, my lungs became “hyper-inflated.”

Ever since I was born it’s been hard for me to breathe. It is the condition of my lungs along with the tummy thing that caused me to get really sick. I started getting really puffy, and I didn’t have enough air in my blood. Since I didn’t have enough air in my blood, the doctors decided to give me more blood. When that didn’t work the way they wanted it to, they put me on a different kind of ventilator. Unfortunately, the only kind of ventilator that would work for me at that time was a “pumping” kind of ventilator, and while it “pumped,” my little lungs started putting a lot of pressure on my heart. Since there was pressure on my little heart, my heart couldn’t pump the blood to the rest of my little body—including my kidneys. And since my kidneys weren’t getting the blood flow they needed, they weren’t filtering the waste out of my blood like they should have. The doctors and nurses were doing everything they possibly could to make me feel better. While the doctors and nurses were doing everything they could to make me feel better, my mommy and daddy, the rest of my family and many, many friends were praying for me.

Finally, when it looked like nothing else was working to make me feel better, the doctors decided to put a strong kind of medicine into my lungs. The doctor told my mommy and daddy that the drug would either be beneficial for me, or that I could have “an extremely adverse reaction” to the drug. The doctor told my mommy and daddy that they could either let them use the drug, or they could take all the tubes and stuff out of my little body and hold me until I went home to be with Jesus. Since it didn’t look like anything else was working, my mommy and daddy told the doctor to give me the drug because even though they knew that I would be going home to Jesus, they wanted to have me with them for as long as possible.

Before the doctors gave me that medicine, Pastor Mary Lynn baptized me with my mommy and daddy and both my grandmas standing around my incubator. My mommy and daddy know that I didn’t need to be baptized to go home to be with Jesus, but they decided that they would just like me to have that special blessing.

While my mommy and daddy, my Grandma Karen, my Meema Mary and Pastor Mary Lynn were in the room with me, the doctors and nurses gave me the medicine. Everyone in the room with me was very afraid of what would happen to me, and everyone was praying for me. About a half hour after I got the medicine, I started feeling just a little better. My lungs started to feel better so the nurses turned down the ventilator so that my heart could pump my blood where it needed to be. And I started to pee! I didn’t know peeing was so important! Everyone was so relieved.