Help Support Lainey’s PICU Costs

Update June 30th:

An update on Lainey, since posting originally she has gone through quite a few ups and downs.

She was finally able to tolerate feeding and thought that she was going to be discharged early next week, unfortunately that night she spiked a fever of 102.3° which for a newborn is extremely dangerous. They did a full round of labs that they could and thankfully no meningitis.

As of this morning both her wound and blood culture show bacteria growth, most concerning is the blood culture showing bacteria as it can quickly become sepsis.

Her surgeon has brought on the infectious disease team from University of WI. Lainey is down to only 1 IV and typically aggressive antibiotics cause IVs in babies to go bad within a few days and she's worried they won't be able to get a new IV site. Typically once IVs are bad they will put in a central line but with having the blood infection that can be dangerous.

If you can only imagine this is an insanely stressful time and Louie and Sam also have G to take care of. Thank you to everyone that has already helped, if you can’t help monetarily please share and spread the word. We appreciate any and all help!

Original: My brother and sister-in-law welcomed their 2nd little girl to the world, named Lainey Sue, on June 12th. Initially, everything was going well and they were settling into being a family of 4.

At only 8 days old, things took a change for the worse.

On the 19th, Wednesday morning at 4am, Sam was rocking her to sleep when she vomited a ton of bright green/yellow substance. They took her in and had an ultrasound done that came back normal and were sent home to follow up with her PCP the next day.

Thursday, they followed up with their PCP. The doctor laid Lainey down on the table to examine her and she threw up everywhere. This time it was a dark green color which the doctor wasn’t happy with, she ordered an X-ray which also came back fine but the doctor wasn’t okay with just sending them home. She called the hospital to see if the pediatrician on call would accept Lainey as an overnight watch and thankfully he did.

The hospital pediatrician, after seeing the color and amount of throw up, asked to call in the pediatric surgeon who ordered an upper GI with contrast.

The results came back that Lainey had a malrotation of the intestines. He said it wasn’t emergent as he didn’t see a full twist but would need surgery. The surgeon explained that her intestines hadn’t developed correctly and were basically smooshed in a small ball on one side with her colon shoved off to the other side making the area for blood vessels to get through very small.

Due to having the staff available and concerns that newborns can deteriorate really quickly, she was taken in for an emergency surgery where it was discovered that she actually had a full twist of the intestines which didn’t show up in any of the tests and her appendix was stuck to her colon causing even more of an obstruction so he removed that as well.

They put in a GI tube to suction out the rest of the bile as well as the lymphatic fluid that had built up. The rest of that night was extremely rough. They had a hard time getting her pain under control and anytime the suction would go off she’d flinch and curl up which I’m sure was hurting her belly so much. At about 3am Friday morning, Sam was able to finally hold her which seemed to help with her comfort

She wasn’t producing any wet diapers so she was given extra fluids every 6 hrs. She still wasn’t producing enough wet diapers so they continued the extra fluids into Friday night when she finally started giving them a couple of wet diapers so this morning they stopped the extra fluids. They do an x-ray every morning to make sure her tube hasn’t moved and so far that has been going good.

Right now the goals are to get her to poop to make sure everything is still functioning right inside and to get her to tolerate feeds so we can make sure she isn’t still vomiting.

Lainey will be in the PICU for at least 2 weeks and as you can imagine the expense will be massive. Plus with the family living out of state the rest of the family is limited on what we can do to help out. So I’m really hoping that you can find it in your hearts to donate either here or directly to Sam’s Venmo which I hope to attach to the photos.