Featured cherub of the week is angel Isaiah Cain. Isaiah is the son of Morgan Diamond and she had this to share about her precious son:
“Hello! My name is Morgan and I am the mother of a non-survivor. His name is Isaiah Cain. He was born on April 11th, 2017 at UAB in Birmingham and immediately transferred to Children’s of Alabama. We are actually from Albertville, which is two hours away, but on our 18th week ultrasound our ultrasound tech saw something that wasn’t right. When our doctor came in we were unofficially diagnosed with CDH. This is the first time we had ever heard of this condition. A few weeks later we got the official diagnoses at UAB.
After I gave birth to him and he was transferred to Children’s, things with his condition were not good, he had a significant hole in his diaphragm where his stomach, intestines, and liver was all in his chest. Before I was able to go see him in Children’s, I kept getting calls from the doctor to okay them trying different breathing machines until they finally had to get the okay for ECMO. He finally was able to be stabilized.
At 11 days old is when he had his repair surgery. It seemed like for weeks after that nothing was getting better and it was just at a standstill. Mother’s Day was on a Sunday that year and that Friday before they decided to try to take him off ECMO for the first time. I was incredibly nervous since his main doctor was on vacation but we went ahead with it. At first he was doing really well and we were so excited! On Saturday everything started going downhill fast to the point his nurse was having to bag him, while also on a ventilator because his stats kept dropping. The head doctor on that weekend came and talked with me and we ended up putting him back on ECMO.
Sunday (Mother’s Day), the head ECMO nurse had a talk with us saying that he may not have enough lungs so survive and we need to start thinking about our options. All of a sudden that evening he started doing so good and over the next 24 hours the nurses was able to wean the ECMO machine down to the lowest settings they could. That Tuesday, he came off ECMO for good! Isaiah was on ECMO for a total of 6 weeks. He ended up needing dialysis after, but soon got over that. Then on June 2nd, he was able to get off the ventilator and onto the CPAP machine, then it wasn’t long after that he was on the regular nose cannulas! Isaiah was surprising everyone with how well we was doing! We was so happy that there was finally light at the end of the tunnel. Then a few weeks later he got sick, all the hospitals tests came back negative for everything they tested for. He seemed to get over it a bit but then got sick again, this time it was just too much. Within 4 days he was doing good from being worse than he started.
On July 4th, Isaiah’s nurses, doctors, and nurse practitioner tried literally everything. His stats were so low, he was so swollen, and there was just nothing having any effect on him. To quote his nurse practitioner they literally were throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him. Just nothing was making a difference. That is when he started coding. The first time it took 3 times the amount of drugs for an adult to stabilize him. We were in the room the whole time this went on. After coding three more times that day, we made the choice to stop it. To stop everything and stop putting him through that. Isaiah was unplugged from all the machines and we brought our family in and we got to love on him and spend all the time we needed until we were ready to say goodbye. I have to say the walk out of that hospital was the hardest steps I ever had to take.”
