On January 11th at 8:15am we welcomed our sweet baby Cal into the world! He decided to come a few weeks early and it's such a miracle how it all happened.
As I mentioned in a previous post when I announced I was pregnant with Cal, we knew there was a chance he'd be born with some chromosome abnormalities. We knew it was out of our hands and just felt so blessed that we were even pregnant with him, so every day we just prayed that he would continue to grow and develop into a healthy baby boy.
After a fairly normal and easy labor and delivery, Cal made his debut! He wasn't breathing well on his own and needed respiratory support. Because we knew he might be born with some abnormalities, we had lots of doctors ready to care for him right when he was born. A heart echo was one of the things they did right away, and the results came back showing quite a few defects with his little heart. At that point it was pretty clear he had the unbalanced chromosome translocation, but the microarray test results confirming this would take over a week to get back.
Over the next few days Cal was showing a lot of improvements and after a follow up heart echo, his cardiologist told us we could pretty much rule out a heart surgery at that point because his heart was functioning normally and doing its job, despite all of the little defects it showed. What a blessing it was to hear that!
During the next week as we waited for the chromosome test results we started to get a little bit hopeful that maybe he didn't have the chromosome translocation after all. He was looking so good and healthy, it was hard to believe there could be anything wrong with our perfect baby boy.
Well, the test results came back and did confirm his unbalanced translocation - a partial trisomy of chromosome 15 and a partial deletion of chromosome 16.
Because this is so uncommon and there really aren't any known cases of people with this exact genetic condition, we really don't know what this means for Cal or what effects it will have on him in the future. What we do know is that we love him so much and that he is the perfect baby for us. We know he was meant to come be part of our family and fulfill his purpose here on earth.
Today marks day 23 in the NICU with Cal. It's been tough but we are so grateful for the care he's receiving from incredible doctors and nurses and are continuing to pray for his body to heal so that he can come home with us soon.
Thank you for all the love, prayers and support. I will be posting another update soon!
-Regan
P.S. The nurses all tell me Cal's the best dressed baby in the NICU so I thought I'd share a few of his outfit details below ;)
