Ziva Faye made her arrival 9 weeks early while Matt and I were on vacation in Florida. She did great at birth, but shortly after she was born she was diagnosed with duodenal atresia - her duodenum (the bottom of her stomach) was not connected to her jejunum (the small intestines). She had surgery to repair it on her 3rd day of life. When they tried to take her breathing tube out after surgery, she was struggling to breathe. Her airway showed evidence of swelling, but her breathing didn’t improve after steroids. The ENT (ear, nose, throat) doctor decided to scope her and to everyone’s surprise- he found she was breathing out of an airway the size of a pencil tip. He came and talked to us and said the only safe option was to put in a trach, as her airway was too narrow to re-intubate even if they wanted to. We don’t know exactly what is going on in her airway, but we will be following up in Cincinnati for airway reconstruction when Ziva gets bigger.
