A bad week

Hello all,

I am betting that a few of you have noticed that I haven’t been on any blogs recently. We have had a very bad week in our house, and would love your prayers.

Let me start a while back. A few months ago, when our youngest was learning to walk, she had a hard fall, so we took her to the emergency room.

Though she seemed fine, they thought it would be a good idea to perform a CT-scan on her. They found that there was no damage from the fall, but that her ventricles were asymmetric (these are two regions in the brain where blood flows). Essentially, we had no idea what they were talking about, but they recommended that we follow up with our pediatrician. The pediatrician took a look at her and thought that it would be a good idea to have an MRI done on her.

I can tell you that to do an MRI on a 13-month old child, they need to knock her out. It was a low point to watch them put the oxygen mask on your little girl and cart her off. My heart was very low that day.

The MRI returned and we found out some news that caused our spirits to drop a little: our little girl had a stroke during the pregnancy. They didn’t show me the MRI, but the doctor said that she seemed to be fine, so there was no need to worry too much about it: after all, she was walking and was ahead of the normal timetable on most of her developmental elements.

Over the next couple of months, we noticed that she favored her right side significantly over her left, so at her 15-month checkup we pointed this out to our pediatrician. She told us that she wouldn’t have noticed if we hadn’t pointed it out, but now that we did, that it would be a good idea for us to see a neurologist to have a closer look at her.

Last Thursday, we went and the neurologist diagnosed our little angel with mild Cerebral Palsy. For the first time, I saw the MRI and the extent of the damage from the stroke. It was extensive. Fortunately for us, it was limited to the white matter of the brain, not the grey matter, so no cognitive facilities were affected. The neurologist was wonderful about explaining all of this to us, and assured us that occupational therapy should handle almost all of the issues she has. We were very fortunate that it wasn’t worse, but for safety we have to now schedule a visit with a Neural Surgeon to have her ventricles looked at; we had to bring her in for an EEG (which turned out great by the way). And we are having a MRE done in a couple of months.

Still to hear someone say that your little girl is not ‘perfect’ is so hard. God is so wonderful though: through this he has prepared my wife an I for this. We have had the support of family, friends and our church.

This past Sunday, I was at church for my older daughter’s musical, I was feeling a little sick, but felt well enough to get through the program. By the end of the night, my abdomen was hurting so much that I was buckled over in pain. We went home, and I tried to rest for a few hours, but the pain worsened. It was on to the Emergency room for me!

I have had kidney stones before so I thought maybe this was another stone-attack. I was so confident that this is what it was that I told my wife to stay at home I drove myself to the hospital. It turned out that it was my appendix and I had to have an appendectomy. I was made comfortable with pain killers and awaited surgery.

Again, our family, church, friends, and coworkers were wonderful, I felt bad for the guy in the room with me because of the steady stream of pastors, friends, and family that visited during this time. We are so blessed to have people like this around us.

Two days later, I am home now, I am week, sore and pretty much just lounging around. My forced vacation will pretty much keep me hanging around the house for the most part for next couple of weeks. If you think of it, lift up a prayer for our house. This is quite an additional load during the holidays.

In the new year I will be back in swing, but for now I am going to crawl back into bed and get some more rest.

God Bless
Doug