He’s here! Introducing Gilbert Barnabas, Gus for short.

He’s actually been here for quite a while. Gus arrived on April 22, 2023, just over a month ago. (I will tell you all about his arrival in another post.) So many prayers were answered, including that we were both able to come home from the hospital together just two days after he was born. I almost got a chance to write a post about him, but then just a couple days later a low temperature reading at his check up sent us back to the ER and ultimately landed is in the NICU.

We had a four-day stay for some warming and oxygen support, and we were so grateful to be able to go home when we did.

On the first night of our hospital stay, Gus received a tentative diagnosis of transient myeloproliferative disease, a pre-cancerous condition that is very common among newborns with Down syndrome and potentially very dangerous. We googled, we cried, we prayed, and we all held our breath. By the next day when we finally met with the hematologist, there was absolutely no trace of the offending blast cells in his bloodwork. We may never know if his diagnosis was a false positive or if his TMD just resolved very quickly (it often does), but either way, prayers were mightily answered for our tiny boy.

He is home now and keeping me busy with pumping and round the clock supplemental feeding, but for all that, he is thriving! We are so in love, and so happy that he is here. The world is a better place with Gus in it.