The Alaska Seidels

I just wanted to take this time and ask for everyone to take a minute out of their day when they read this and to please pray for our friends' baby boy Zayden. He's only two weeks old and has gone through more than Austin, Kevin and I could go through in a lifetime. He was born with Pulmonary atresia and had open heart surgery a few days after he was born. And then when he was getting better and it was looking like he was going to be to go home or at least near his home this happened:



so....we were supposed to be coming home monday morning with zayden....everything was progressing smoothly. Zayden was eating, and they had almost all the tubes/wires off him.

we have been staying at a place 5 min from the hospital and we were just falling asleep thurs night when we got a call around midnight telling us to get to the hospital immediately because there was an emergency. (we had only been gone from the hospital an hour and 1/2).

this is what happened: (sry its kinda a long story)
there is always supposed to be one nurse watching each baby, but that night they were short handed so they took our nurse to help somewhere else for 4 hrs and the other nurse in the room was supposed to be watching zayden in addition to her assigned baby. Since zayden was doing so well he didnt really require much beside feedings and some medication, but the other baby she was watching was still under close watch. She was supposed to feed zayden at 10pm and from what we heard she fed him around 11, then layed him down. The story we heard is that she stepped out of the room for a minute because she was asking another doctor for something and when she came back zayden was throwing up and choking on it. A normal baby would have been able to handle that but with zayden's condtion, if he gets upset or goes through something thats hard on his heart and lungs, they can't handle the stress and he stops getting oxygen to his brain and lungs.

so when we got to the hospital they had about 10 people in the room working on him, doing chest compressions/trying to get a heart beat and trying to get him to breathe. They kicked us out of the room about 10 min later when the surgeon arrived and proformed a small surgery at his bedside where they had to put him on a heart/lung bypass machine. 2 doctors came out to talk to us at different times and both of them told us since he had such low oxygen levels for such a long time, that he had a very high chance of dying....and if he didnt die he would have brain damage.

The bypass machine was keeping him alive until morning when they could try to figure more out like what happened/ how to fix the problem.

he had catherization surgery the next morning where they stuck a catheter up the vessel in his thigh and into his heart and they shot dye into him so they could take pictures of his heart to figure out what was wrong.

the surgery went well, and they ended up taking him off the bypass machine, and assuming the entire episode was just due to him choking and having a really bad domino effect from it, since they couldnt see anything wrong in the pictures they took.

so now:
he is hooked up to a ventilator that is helping him breathe, and they are giving him oxygen, but they are trying to wean him off that by tomorrow or monday. He has an infection in his blood, so they are giving him antibiotics. He has a level 2 bleed in his brain (level 2 out of 4 being the highest)...and they are not sure if he has any brain damage yet.

He's obviously doing better....and they dont THINK he has brain damage so far...but everything is pretty much a wait and see kind of situation at this point.

I wasn't there that night so I don't know the real truth, but basically I am blaming that stupid nurse for this HUGE set back. I feel like if she had been watching him like she should have been and caught him choking...none of this would have happened.
Joey and I are not leaving zayden's side from now on!!!! My mom came down and we are all taking shifts sitting by his side watching every move he makes!!! Its sad that we can't even trust the nurses to do their jobs now!
At least he is alive!! Hopefully things will look better in the morning as his swelling goes down and they try to get him off the ventilator.

thanks for all the support !!
I know its a ways away, but I can't wait to take him home and show him off :-)




This breaks my heart that they have to go through this. Their names are Joe and Lindsey Yanes and they are great wonderful loving people and need our prayers soo badly. Please take a moment to pray for Zayden and that he'll get better and have a wonderful normal life after this is all over. Thank you.