Luke's first months home were busy and full of adjustments. Luke came home on May 20th and we had a busy summer ahead of us. We loved being able to be in the same place as Luke all the time. We did have to get used to being confined to one area of the house with Luke because of all the machines he was attached to. At some point we got ourselves together and had a regular set up with his vent and suction in the living room and just moved the pulse ox and apnea monitor when we moved him. Still this only afforded us really two places to be with Luke. We did get him loaded up onto his Kid-kart (a stroller with a lot of carrying capacity for his vent, suction, vent battery and monitors) and took him outside a few times for a walk around the yard. He fell asleep the first time out but the next time he was awake and right away liked to touch trees and look at everything. We live in a swamp (a forested wetland) and there is lots of nature to see. Luke still loves to touch leaves, needles and bark and constantly signs for more when we are outside.
Between Luke's appointments for casting to correct his clubbed feet every week and seeing our other 9 specialists we were in Grand Rapids (GR) at least once a week and two months after being home we were there three times in seven days with a night of no nursing in the middle. It was a pretty crazy summer. Grand Rapids for us is 3.5 to 4 hours away depending on stops to change diapers and other things. Luke did great and was a pretty mellow go with the flow baby which was awesome! He did get fussy sometimes which worried me but then my mom reminded me that he is a baby and babies fuss.
We saw the pulmonologist for this first time about a month after coming home. I was pretty nervous because I had been having a hard time effectively communicating with her in the NICU and I was pretty set on starting to wean Luke off the vent as I thought he was doing wonderfully. The pulmonologist said they like to wait for two months of being home and stable before weaning but allowed Luke's PEEP to go from 6 to 5 on that first visit. We communicated wonderfully and I was feeling good about our future relationship with this pulmonologist.
In June Luke also saw the Neruodevelopment team which consisted of a physical therapist (PT), Occupational Therapist (OT), speech therapist, nurse, social worker, and a doctor. It was a long appointment but they gave us some good ideas about how to help Luke get strong enough to hold his head up on his own. (Luke was 4 ½ months at this point). We also were getting the process started to get into the Early On program with the school system and get a PT and OT to come into our house and do therapy with Luke. We were working off of the PT and OT suggestions from the NICU and were excited about the possibility of help on a regular basis. We ended up with an OT, who did some PT as well, coming about once a week. We had PT 1-2 times per month and speech therapy and vision therapy each once a month. I liked all the therapy because it helped Luke get used to other people, gave me new ideas for therapy and kept me more accountable to work with Luke.
At the end of June Luke had a GI bug and a possibility of some seizures that the nurses had been seeing. We had and still do have nursing 12 hours every night. Neruodevelopment scheduled an EEG for one of the next times when we were down in GR. He didn't have any more seizure activity before the EEG and the EEG came out normal. You don't always see seizures on the studies but the doctors still decided to wait and see if he had more before treating with medicine. The doctors were reluctant to use seizure medicine because it can be a long term medicine once a child is put on it. I was okay with this as I am not a medicine person and Luke had so much other medical intervention I hesitate to add more.
Luke is very “talkative” as he has learned to make noise over then vent. He really has only one or two tones but we love to hear it. It is very cute. It is also a way to judge how he feels because when he gets sick and doesn't feel as well he doesn't make as much noise. Since he doesn't have facial expression this was a good indicator for us when he was little. Since being taken off the vent during the day he doesn't make noise. With the vent he had something to push against to make the noise and with just the trach that isn't there. We miss the noise but not the vent.
Luke LOVES to look at his hands. He is amazed by them and he does all sorts of things with his fingers. He pinches his thumb and first finger together and is just really cute about it. He likes to play with and bat around his cloth blocks and other toys in his crib as well as his mobile.
At the beginning of July Luke had his first blue episode at home. I woke up when the nurse called me down. Luke had turned blue and she has used the ambu bag to bring him back. By the time I got there he was very pasty and pale but awake and alert. He fell asleep shortly afterwards for about 15 minutes and then woke up ready to go like nothing had happened. I called the pulmonologist to let them know and they wanted us to go the ER to have him checked out. They did x-rays and blood work and found nothing. I think Luke just got some water down his tubes. In the hospital he had a lot of episodes where he turned blue and his stats dropped but we got him back fast and easily. We couldn't conclusively prove it but were pretty sure there was too much water from the humidifier in his vent tubing that would build up and flow down into his lungs sometimes. In the hospital we had notes on his crib to keep his vent tubes flat with no places to collect water to try to prevent this. We also turned the temperature down on his humidifier so the difference between the air and tubes would be less and thus less condensation would happen.
Also, during this same time a nurse saw another seizure which we were going to talk to the neurologist about when we saw him a few days later. And Luke had a head cold as we were pulling yellow/green stuff out of his nose. Thankfully this stayed out of his lungs.
When we saw the Neurologist they wanted us to get a 24 EEG and a MRI to try to catch a seizure and see what was really going on. Getting an MRI would mean Luke would need to be sedated and a different trach would have to be put in because his current trach has metal in it. We would do the MRI and EEG in the same trip and spend a couple of days in the PICU at DeVoss Children's Hospital. We needed to be in the PICU (Pediatric ICU) because Luke is on a vent and thus considered fragile. These were scheduled for September.
By the middle of July we were in the normal swing of things again and got his third tooth! Luke is now able to sit up (with help) and hold his own head up. We are still working on the head control when he is on his tummy though. His hand control gets better and better all the time and he is really into shaking toys right now. He figured out that he can make his mobile move by shaking the rings we have dangling from a line across his crib and through the mobile. All this shaking and noise makes it easier to tell what he is doing when you are not right in the room with him. He has fallen asleep with his arm in the rings and was even moving them in his sleep.
A bad thing that happened was that we lost our 3 days a week nurse. This was a large portion of our nursing and took us totally off guard. It happened right before she had 3 out of 4 days on. There were a lot of not so nice phone calls and some lost sleep but a nurse already with our nursing company stepped up to fill in, temporarily at first but then she fell in love with Luke and decided to stay and is still with us :)
At the end of July Luke was finally done with his every week castings and his Achilles tendons were clipped and casts were put on for a final three weeks of casts. During his castings Luke had started with plain plaster casts, which is normal for castings to correct clubbed feet. However, Luke spent his days banging his casts together and broke through them so had to get them reinforced with fiberglass. The fun thing about this was that he got to get a different color cast every time. The tendon clipping was met with lots of crying and as much soothing by me as I could do and still have them be able to do the procedure. After all the fuss he was asleep before they were done casting. After three weeks the casts were cut off for the final time and Luke was free. Well almost free, he now had sandals attached with a bar that turned his feet out. He will wear the sandals and bar 23 hours a day with only an hour break for at least three months. The first day with theses on was very trying and I have never had Luke cry so much. It was very hard for me to go through but fortunately I had my mom to help me out that day and she helped a LOT.
The casts came off just in time for his baptism which was his first trip to church. We had Luke on a look but don't touch plan at church, and he still is. Yeah maybe I am a little crazy but there are a lot of people handshaking, eating, coughing, ect... at church and then exchanging it with everyone else. Luke was serenaded with a baptism song by my mom's drum group and he was baptized by my dad and our pastor.
Luke's July visit to the pulmonologist went really well. I was prepared to have to ask to have him start weaning and the doctor came in with a plan in place to start weaning Luke the next day! We were going to start by lowering his back up breath rate by two every two weeks. Also the nutritionist, who I thought should have increased Luke's food at the last visit came in with an increase of food at this visit. So good all the way around! Through all this I was pumping breastmilk for Luke. So some days all I felt like I dealt with was food, either pumping it or feeding Luke.
Luke's first visit to the ophthalmologist gained him a pair of glasses at just 6 months old. His Moebius Syndrome lends him to have crossed eyes which is compounded by finding out he is far-sighted and far-sightedness lends itself to having crossed eyes as well. The far-sightedness is not from Moebius Syndrome but is genetic and from my mother, who had glasses at 11 months. Luke got the cutest little white framed glasses. Thankfully they were made out of a silicon with polycarbonate lenses so basically baby proof. And he looks so cute in them. He doesn't pull them off his face and in time he started putting them back on his face correctly when they accidentally came off. However, when upset he will grab at them and pull them off, but he usually tries to put them back on soon afterwards.
Our first summer with Luke was quite eventful and at the end Luke was down to 10 on his breath rate, had new glasses, done with casting and onto the Ponsetti brace (bar and sandals), holding his head up, and just being an all around cute baby.
So I just remembered some more things about that time for Luke. First, he started signing!! I think his first sign was "milk" and he did "diaper" and "suction" pretty soon thereafter. We started teaching Luke sign since he can't talk and between the trach and Moebius Syndrome facial paresis we were pretty sure it would be awhile. Currently Luke is very talkative with his sign and he babbles and makes up his own signs.
Also, after Luke was done with all his surgeries they found he had high blood pressure. The Nephrologist's working theory was that the high blood pressure was due to some acute damage to the kidneys from his umbilical catheter that was places at birth and in for a few days. He was put on high blood pressure medication and his blood pressures were monitored at home by nurses and every time we could get to their office when we were in GR we got a blood pressure.
