Well here we are. Zoe Holtz Henry was born on Tuesday August 12th at 4:13 AM. She weighs 8 lbs 4 oz. We don't have a length on her yet. It was a very long week and delivery. Jason and I headed over to Seattle on August 6th thinking we were starting the induction that day, but there were no ECMO beds available at Childrens hospital so they decided to wait on the induction. The doctors wanted to make sure that she had a ECMO bed available in case she needed it. We waited for 4 days with lots of phone calls back and forth to the doctors and no beds were opening up so to make a long story short, we headed down to Portland Oregon's Emanuel Legacy Childrens Hospital on Saturday night at 9:00. We got here about 1:30 Sunday morning and they started to induce me. It was a long go of it and nothing much happened for about 48 hours. About 9:00 on Monday evening the doctors broke my water and everything kicked in. I had an epidural and fell asleep for a few hours, woke up around 2:30 AM on Tuesday, started pushing around 3:15 and we had our beautiful Baby Zoe at 4:13.
As all of you know she has a Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia as so she went through a series of steps to see what sort of support she needed. After several different ventilators, the doctors decided to put her on the ECMO machine which is basically a bypass machine that lets her lungs rest and does all of her breathing and oxygenating for her. SHe is holding steady on the ECMO machine right now with perfect levels of oxygen and blood pressure. In a few days the doctors will start trying to ween her off of some of the support and we are hoping that her lungs will be strong enough to take some pressure and work. She will probably have surgery towards the end of next week. It's all a big waiting game right now, but she looks as good as she can given all the circumstances. The doctors and nurses have all been fantastic here, very supportive and informative and Zoe is in the best possible hands she could be in. We met another couple the other day who also has a baby in the NICU with a CDH and they were feeding and holding him for the first time in 3 weeks so Jason and I are hoping we will be there soon with Zoe. She has a long road ahead of her, but we are hoping she will fight through and be tough.
