Cash was born on March 6th 2018 at a healthy 7 pounds 8 ounces after a normal healthy pregnancy.
We took him home and noticed that he was a very sleepy baby but just attributed it to being a newborn. He would often even be too sleepy to eat so we were seeing his pediatrician almost every single day for weight loss and poor feeding. There were absolutely no indications anything other than a feeding problem was going on during that time. On Thursday night on March 15th we noticed that something seemed off, he was sleeping much more than he had which was more than the average newborn and had started to refuse feedings. He had an appointment scheduled for Friday afternoon but we sensed something was very weong and took him to St. Elizabeth emergency room first thing that morning. They immediately sent us over to Mary Bridge where after several invasive tests we learned that Cash had Adenovirus, a respitory viral infection which ultimatley sent his body into full viral Sepsis.
The first few days he had spent on just breathing maks until we were woken up to the news that he was in multi organ failure including his lungs heart and kidneys. His body had swollen up 4x his size due to the plastic inside of his body from the machines, and we were informed that there was a high chance he wouldnt even survive while waiting for a transfer to childrens hospital. Thankfully after several failed attempts we were successfully transferred to Seattle Childerens where he was placed on VV life support which was intitally just for his lungs, that was enough for a few days until his heart began to worsen and he was ultimatley put on full blown heart and lung life support. The first week was spent completely just trying to get him stable, it was hour to hour not knowing if he would survive.
A few days later his numbers improved and his sats were starting to normalize, his swelling had almost completely gone down and he was far more awake and alert. Then he got a 1 in a million chance of having a thumb sized air bubble go through his machine causing it to turn off and malfunction. He was without oxygen for over 5 minutes before they were able to get the machine turned back on. Thankfully there was no immediate damage such as a stroke or bleed however there are areas that are showing potential damage that we cant further investigate until he is off ECMO.
Since then Cash has slowly began to improve, He is stable and showing promising signs that he will recover and come home eventually to his parents and sister and brother who adore him.
