Haven had a very restful night last night.  As you can imagine, we’ve been keeping a close eye on her chest drainage over the past couple of weeks.  In fact, we have a spiffy little graph that we plot our data on, and since we’ve done that some interesting connections have been made that should be very helpful in getting Haven to the place she needs to be.  For example, her chest drainage was considerably less after both of her chest surgeries, however, today we noticed the drainage was up a bit.  Well since we had this graph to compare her drainage amounts now with those of the last surgery, we noticed that the same thing happened then.  That seemed peculiar to us, and after wracking our brains a bit, we were able to draw a connection between her chest tube drainage and her feeding.  After both procedures, her chest drainage began to increase once we resumed feedings.  Interesting.

We shared our findings with the doctors and they were able to gain some insight as well.  So now we are working on hopefully completely eliminating the drainage by altering her feeds and her diet.  We (and others here) are somewhat optimistic about this plan.  Ideally, we will also be able to start weaning Haven off of the ventilator support she has been on.  She’s done fairly well with that so far, but she still has a ways to go.  There are several things we’re working on over the next few days to hopefully get Haven moving forward. 

We would like to take this time to restate for all of you how thankful we are for God’s grace and the salvation we have through His Son, Jesus Christ.  Regardless of what we face here on earth, our standing with God cannot be changed and the blessings in Heavenly places are waiting for us when we go to spend eternity with Him.  Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down with life’s circumstances (good or bad), and we need to remember that God has already done for us more than we deserve by giving us eternal life through His Son, Jesus Christ.  Someday everything in this life will pass away and be no more, but we will be forever with the Lord.  “And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye always having all sufficiency in all things, may about to every good work…thank be to God for His unspeakable gift.” 2 Corinthians 9:8 & 15