our hearts our relatively at ease...

our neonatal doctor was in a little bit ago. our first meeting with him was very matter of fact. he explained the process from this point - if elias continues to progress, they will try reducing and then removing the light treatment later tomorrow. they will then need to monitor to see how his body responds without the treatment. if his numbers continue to go down - we're great. if they go up slightly - that is not uncommon and will need a little more monitoring, but still okay. if they go up drastically they will need to continue with treatment. he said that all things considered, we are probably here for 2-4 more days (leaving at the earliest on wednesday and the latest hopefully on tuesday). he said he thought things were heading in the right direction. we of course were concerned about long term affects, and he didn't have a lot of assurance for us. he said that he would be willing to do an mri if we wanted him to in order to scan for brain deposits.

then we ate dinner - and as with most dinners lately, having just had the conversation with the doctor, we had no appetite. we barely ate anything - which is unusual for me as any of you who know me know. we talked more about the mri and decided that we needed to ask the doctor a few more questions.

the second meeting with him was more personal, which we appreciated. we asked him to explain the numbers a bit so that we could get a better idea of what we were looking at. he told us that there had never been anyone with the jaundice level that elias had yesterday who ended up with brain damage. his level of 21.5 was well below the 35-45 range that he said they found the brain damage with. we asked more questions regarding whether or not it was possible that elias peaked in that range at all. he said based on a lot of different factors that he did not. he said if he was the parent, he would not be concerned. obviously there are no guarantees, but that was enough assurance to help us be more at ease tonight.

we are looking forward to hopefully getting all of this cleared up in the next few days, to go home and enjoy our big guy. we have a lot of work to do to get him ready for bears and irish football, so we need him in tip top shape :-) thanks for your prayers.