Hi Friends and Family,
Today was another great update for out little Lucille. She has been growing by the gram and is now over 1 kilo!!!!!! It's official, she's our drug ;)... um, maybe fix? Either way it's great that she is continuing to put on weight and for my American friends reading this... well... yea for pretty much EVERYONE on here, minus a few, we have a 2lb 5oz babe. Lucie Pie continues to show great vitals, her oxygen is good, and she is tolerating feeds. The main areas of focus continue to be her heart and brain.
On that note, we do have a major update in our prayer requests. As we mentioned, tomorrow Lucie is schedule for surgery to close the PDA duct in her heart. They will perform the echo in the morning to see if they recommend the surgery, and if so, we will be meeting with the heart surgeon at High Noon tomorrow for any questions before he does the procedure in the afternoon. From what we have been told time and time again, this surgery is a minor procedure and is very commonly required for preemies, especially at her age. Even though we understand that, it is still difficult to think about. We have constantly been praying that the duct would close again so that she wouldn't have to go through the procedure. I pray, pray, pray that the duct would close again and that we could all sing that classic hit "Ding Dong the murmur's Gone" once more. Please pray that it would close. If it doesn't and surgery is required, please pray that Lucie would be SO strong during the surgery, that the doctors would be on point, that mom and dad would be calm and filled with peace, and that Lucie wouldn't have any set backs or complications because of it. We are contemplating asking them if they think it is possible to hold off a bit to try and see if it still might close on it's own, and even that they would consider it themselves, based on how well she is doing as a whole. We will trust their recommendations either way, as we, in no way, want to cause any complications by wanting the surgery to be pushed back.
Usually she has her head sono on Mondays but since it was a holiday, that may be tomorrow instead... if she has the PDA surgery then the head sono may not be until a later day this week. For now, they continue to monitor her head circumference and it is growing at a healthy, good pace (24.5 cm today).
In other news, as we have been teasing about many times already, we have a website! Our amazing, talented, generous friends designed and put together a website for us that contains all of our previous email updates about Lucille! The website is www.loshicksons.com. It has posts from our family blog (Hickson Huddle) that Drea updates regularly too. Take a sneak peak tonight, and enjoy!! Hopefully, starting tomorrow our updates will be on the website directly, instead of emails, and you will get a notification once the updates have published. If you want others to get updates, they can subscribe on the website! If you would rather not get updates automatically, you can easily unsubscribe, it won't hurt our feelings!! At the end of the day, when we send out these emails, it really helps us. It helps us to process, and get our minds around everything that is going on. So again, no worries if you click that unsubscribe button at the bottom... we are grateful for you taking the time to read along, to join us on this tough journey, to pray for us and support us!
Love,
Robert, Andrea, Lucille and Bess