Update Thursday 9:00pm

Hi Everyone. Thank you so much for checking in with us and helping us pray for our little girl. I am so encouraged by all your prayers and emails. It means so much to us, we can not even come up with the words to express it.

I was down to see Eleanor at around 6 pm. My parents are back from their abbreviated vacation, and it was so nice to introduce them to their granddaughter and pray for her together.

I am going to break down Eleanor's progress into two separate issues:

First, the breathing issue. This was the issue on the "front table" for the NICU. Before they could do anything else, she needed to be stable with her breathing. Well, praise God because they removed the ventilator tube this evening. I guess at first she was not so sure of herself, but they put an air tube thingy in her nose (the kind with two little prongs) which is basically to keep her passages open for breathing. When I saw her, they said she had already made so much progress breathing on her own in that short of time. She looked very comfortable with her breathing.

The second issue is the scary one now; the one that was on the back table. It will now be moved to the forefront. That issue is the lack of muscle tone and reaction. This includes the swallowing issue we mentioned before. Unfortunately, when they removed the tube from her throat, she did not respond by swallowing her own saliva like we had hoped. She is drooling large amounts of saliva, and they have her on her stomach so that it can flow out. They also are suctioning the saliva quite often. As of tonight, they are starting a medication which will basically dry up her saliva and give her "cotton mouth" to prevent choking, etc. So... the lack of tone issue is really scary and the cause is still unknown. The NICU doctor has decided that she will need to see a Pediatric Neurologist for testing, and that needs to happen at Devos Children's Hospital. Unfortunately, they are completely full right now, so we are waiting for a bed to open up. Since her condition is stable and not an emergency, we will wait here at St Mary's for an opening. So, once she gets there, they will hopefully begin testing and get to the bottom of this. There is a whole list of very scary reasons that this could be happening, and frankly we are quite worried right now. Please pray that we will get the answers soon and that they would be on the more minor end of the spectrum.