Vocal cord has been healed!

Micah visited the ENT doctor (ear, nose and throat specialist, aka otolaryngologist) yesterday and was scoped and we found that his vocal cord is no longer paralyzed. Thank you, Lord! Both Mark and I were noticing for the past few days that Micah was much more verbal and sounded more like himself. I thought possibly he was just doing a better job of compensating for the paralysis. But... everything is working just fine in his throat. According to the ENT, Micah doesn't have to go back to see him again (unless he has ear or nasal passage issues in the future, but we would really rather not have to see him again, though he's a nice guy).


So, his lack of eating has nothing to do with the vocal cord. And the speech therapist, Katherine, who has loved on Micah since he was in the NICU in January, shot some milk to the back of Micah's mouth while the camera was rolling and Micah swallowed the milk. So he's physically capable of swallowing (at least when he's screaming)... he apparently just doesn't want to. He definitely has an oral aversion, but he does put his hands to his mouth and allow me to massage his cheeks, inside and out. The prevailing theory is that his reflux is so bad, he just associates anything in the back of the mouth with the pain of stomach acid.


Speaking of reflux... it's just awful. Micah is waking up screaming about every hour overnight. I'm exhausted. The GI more than tripled his dose of prilosec yesterday (to reduce the acid level) so we're hoping to see results from that in the next couple of days. The other thing is that Micah is getting a venting bag for his stomach (to attach to the g-port that goes into his stomach), which will possibly relieve him of some stomach gasses. Just what we need... another item to tote around. But hopefully it will help relieve some of his reflux and pain.

We had a great meeting with Micah's surgeon on Friday. He spent almost an hour with us and it was wonderful to have a doctor take a wholistic approach to Micah's belly issues. He feels as though he could make an adjustment to Micah's duodenum, but he's not convinced it will definitely help him (though it wouldn't make things worse). He feels as though we need to fix the front-end stuff first. He's supposed to be conversing with the GI about it.


I also forgot to post that Micah turned 5 months old on 6/5. Here are some new photos:


Yummy Micah today. This is the outfit Nathan wore home from the hospital. It's probably the only day Micah will wear it since his torso is getting too long for the 0-3months clothes now.

Micah on his 5month b-day with Uncle Dan (visiting from the left coast)

Nathan at 5months (just for reference... some of you didn't know us back then)



Micah with Katherine (speech therapist in Milwaukee)


Nathan with cousins, Lili, Henry, and Katie from Michigan (Nathan and Henry were having a bit of a disagreement over which song button to push in the book)

Thanks for continuing to pray for our little guy, specifically that his reflux would diminish so that we could hopefully convince him to start eating orally again.