A blur of a week

The next few days of Oakley's life were hectic, dramatic, and pretty near killed Trevor and I. One morning when we went to see our little guy, we got a lesson in Biology on neutropenia. Neutrophils are apparently white blood cells that fight off infection. We have 5 different kinds of white blood cells, and 3 of them are infection fighters. As it was taught to me, there are Marine-type cells that are big, tough, and do most of the fighting (Neutrophils), there are Army Reserve-type cells that get called in as reinforcements if it's something the Marines can't handle on their own (Eosinophils), and there are Boy Scout-type cells, that when all Hell is breaking loose, get called in to help with the fight (Basophils). That morning all of Oakley's Marines had been killed off, as had all of his Reserves and most of his Scouts. She told me she had never seen any baby with the numbers Oakley was displaying. He had no immune system at all, getting a cold could kill him.
His blood sugars were still puzzling everyone as well. Babies aren't born with diabetics, in fact, it is super rare for babies to show symptoms of diabetes before they're 6 months old. Despite all of that, Oakley was having high blood sugar after high blood sugar. He kept receiving doses of insulin to try to keep him stable.
All this meant was specialists. That first weekend we met with GastroInterologists, Hematologists, Genetecists, and of course the awesome Neonatalogists and Nurses that Saint Luke's had on staff. They had to do a bone marrow aspiration to see if his body couldn't make white blood cells, or if it was, but something else was killing them off before they matured. A bone marrow aspiration is a horrible thing and I hope that none of you ever has to have one done. They gave Oakley morphine for the procedure, then they took a giant needle and jammed it into his pelvis via his buttock area and sucked out the little blood and marrow that was there. They also needed a piece of the marrow itself (a spongy kind of chunk inside the bone). They didn't get enough to run all the tests that the had wanted, but they got some. They also just about drained the kid of all his blood for a bunch of other tests that they wanted to run. He had a blood transfusion afterward to replace some of what they took. At the end of getting all this stuff, they were able to take out his UAC and UVC-well, actually the UVC started to come out and was no longer viable, so they removed that earlier).

I was so happy to see his little tummy without those tubes, it felt like progress toward an end. This picture was taken after the tubes were gone, it was April 24th, Oakley was 5 days old.