Miriyana Paulson Yana's Voice

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. Mark and I are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement for Yana, Danny, Mark, and myself. Thank you for visiting.

Miriyana Sapphire Paulson (Yana) is our wished for child. She is a beautiful force of nature and possesses a very strong voice.  She was also born with a bronchogenic cyst, which was diagnosed in utero. This cyst is located behind her trachea, where the trachea splits into the right and left main bronchus. When she gets a cold and her body produces mucous, the cyst also fills with mucous and increasingly obstructs her airway on both sides. 

We started this page on February 14, 2018, when Yana was hospitalized in the LPCH (Stanford) PICU and intubated with bronchiolitis, a superimposed bacterial pneumonia, and sepsis. After a one month hospitalization, she recovered completely and suffered no physical, mental, or developmental consequences. She continues to be a smart, feisty, brave and loving little girl who sings all the time.



In March 2018, surgeons at LPCH removed about 90% of the cyst. It grew back and she was hospitalized 3 times for pneumonias between September 2018 and January 2019. In January 2019, a team including ENT, pulmonary, and GI doctors went through Yana's esophagus to get at the cyst, drain it, and add a sclerosing agent in an attempt to permanently stop the cyst from growing and hopefully get it to scar flat. In June 2019, her medical team performed the same procedure for a second time following another pneumonia. But when they drained the cyst, one of her lungs collapsed, and they were unable to inject the sclerosing agent.
Yana had a long stretch of health following the procedure in June. In January, following a cold, the cyst filled with mucous and increased in size.  At the end of January, she got sick again, and the situation evolved. By February 1, she was admitted to the LCPH PICU with RSV bronchiolitis and a superimposed viral pneumonia. She needed increased amounts of respiratory support to deal with respiratory failure, and on February 6, was intubated. An ENT doctor took her down to the OR to drain the cyst, as the airway on both the left and right side was 80% obstructed. With the cyst drained, her airway on the right is completely unobstructed and on the left is 50% obstructed.She is currently fighting fevers, sepsis, and ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). And she will recover fully.