Welcome Brayden

Brayden Michael Worthington entered this world on November 9, 2008.

Stats on Brayden:

Weight - 8 lbs. 6 oz.

Length - 21 1/2 inches

Time - 3:56 pm

He absolutely melted our hearts the second that we met him. He has a ton of long dark hair! As soon as we got to hold him he was very attentive, he loves to look around and check everyone out. He has already gotten to meet his grandparents, who absolutely adore him and already are spoiling him. He also has gotten to meet some of his aunts and uncles. He is a pretty content baby and will give you the pirate look every once in a while to just look around and see what is going on. He slept pretty good the first night, only getting up a few times to eat and then went right back to bed. And let me tell you, he loves to eat!!

On Monday we had noticed that he had started to do a little what we could describe as a twitch/ muscle spasm on his right arm. So we watched it, just thinking that he was cold. But unfortunately he did this twitch 3 times in about a period of 4 hours or so. So we called in the nurse while he was going through the twitch and they immediately took him to be checked out by the pediatrician. Right off the bat they wanted to run some more tests on him to see what was causing this twitch. The 3 things that they thought right off the bat it could be would be an infection, a metabolic problem, or something to do with the brain. So he got poked and picked quite a bit. They did a spinal tap to see if there was an infection in the spinal cord, that came back negative. And all his blood tests initially came back normal so no metabolic problems. The next step was to get him to a CT scan to take some images of his brain.

The scan came back that he had an area on his brain on the left hand side in his parietal lobe. Initially just the general doctor had read it and an adult neurologist, so we didn't know the full extent of everything. In order to keep track of the seizures they were going to hook him up and watch his activity for 24 hours in the NICU. Jon and I went off to bed knowing that he had a spot on his brain, which they were labeling as a stroke, and that they were just going to monitor him.

When we came down in the morning to the NICU, Brayden was a movie star!! They hooked up about 20 electrodes to his head to monitor his brain waves and they literally had a camera watching him so the specialist could watch what would happen during his twitches. Unfortunately he couldn't be held or moved because they needed to monitor all of his movements, so if he cried we couldn't do anything to sooth him. But of course, they have a good trick of putting sugar water on a pacifier and boy does he love that sugar water! I guess he has his mothers taste buds. The nurse in there said he sounds like Maggie Simpson, going to town on that pacifier. He looked pretty content in there with the pacifier in his mouth.

We went down quite a few times to the NICU to visit him and get updates as he went along. The doctors initial assessment of the seizures were as follows. He had a stroke sometime during what they think was during or right after delivery. The brain is trying to compensate for this area of bleeding and swelling so the neurons in that area are over-firing, causing him to have the seizures on the right hand side. Initially they just wanted to watch for when the seizures occur and then give him some anti-seizure medicine to help reduce the seizures. The doctor said that more than likely the damage is done to his brain, but we are just trying to manage the seizures.

He had multiple seizures during the monitoring, so they had maxed out on the amount of medication that they could give to him to help reduce the seizures without affecting his body. They called us last night in the middle of the night to tell us that they would have to start another drug which is going to place him in a sedative state for a couple days. This is going to actually help to relax the brain and let the damaged area sort of heal so that it is not over firing causing him to have these seizures. We called this morning and found out that he's been doing better since getting the new medicine which is promising.

So that is the latest update that we have on him. We are meeting with a pediatric neurologist on Friday who is going to answer all our questions about the long term prognosis and any side affects that he might have due to this stroke. He is definitely one strong kid. Everytime we went down there to see him he would be sound asleep and when he heard Jon and I's voices he would wake up and look at us!!

The ideal of this blog is to keep everyone updated on how he is doing so that we don't have to keep calling and emailing everyone. We are going to try to update it every day while he is in the NICU. Please feel free to write comments and pass along the web address so that everyone can be informed on our little guy. We just ask that everyone keep Brayden in their thoughts and prayers.

If you want to check out the pictures that they took at the hospital you can go to http://www.bellababyphotography.com/ , enter the website, then click on client. The password is worthington (all lower case).