Have you ever felt like time just stands still sometimes? Well, time sure decided to all but come to a grinding halt for us Friday. These hours of waiting to hear something…anything taxed everybody that was praying for little Declan. Fortunately, our wait was not indefinite: late Friday evening we received word from Dr. Koukkari that contradicted everything we had been through the previous three days – "it" was gone!
That’s right - the series of scans taken Friday morning – the day after all those prayers were said for Declan and after he was annointed with holy oil of St. John Maximovich and myrrh from St. Nicholas the Wonderworker – showed no signs of the physical birth defects that were seen in the scans and tests the earlier two days.
To try to make sense of this completely illogical and strange event, Dr. Koukkari had even placed a special call to Dr. Ed Barkovich to ask him to examine the films as soon as possible. He did not want to say anything else about the new films – positive or negative - until he heard back from Dr. Barkovich. Suffice to say though, things were positive enough to move Declan out of the higher-care area of the NICU into the lowest-care areas (one nurse handling four babies instead of one-to-one) for further observation.