Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Where has it gone?

My brain, that is...my creative juices...my very important thought processes! My hope is that it is all going to this little bundle that is baking. The bad news is, well, I just got nutin! I have sat at this computer numerous times to type out a post and it sits in the draft box for days and days until I go back and delete it. I think mainly because I've been so bad about taking pictures and I keep hoping I'll remember the camera the "next time" to add to that post. It seems to be a futile effort.


February has been a very busy month. With birthdays, doctor's appointments, church meetings and trips out of town, you would think I could muster up something to write about.


So I will attempt to break it down. I will start with the doctor's appointments. In the last week we've had 4 appointments between me and the kids. All is well with me and the babe...just hit the 28 week mark, had my glucose tolerance test and will start going to appointments every two weeks now. That means things are going to start flying by.


As for Abbey, many of you know how petite she is and as her parents it is so difficult to see how much it bothers her. It breaks my heart that she has to go through the pain of not only the teasing and mean words that come from kids mouths, but the comments from adults too. It has been on our minds a lot to take her to a specialist to check and make sure all is well, but knowing that Matthew and I are not exactly giants kept telling ourselves it's just in her genes to be petite. But after talking to Abbey one day and realizing just how badly it is affecting her self esteem, we decided to look into getting things checked out. We chose a dr. in Orlando who specialized in pediatric endocrinology. We met with him a little over a week ago and had a very good visit. Abbey really liked him. He was great with her, made her laugh, made her feel grown up all around excellent bedside manner. He seemed to be very knowledgeable yet not too aggressive. We didn't want to just jump into a whole bunch of stuff without having time to think it over. He did an x-ray of her hand while we were there to get her "bone age". Apparently your bone age can be off from your biological age. In her case, because of family history, he fully anticipated seeing that her bone age is about 2 years behind her actual age, which is a good thing, because that means she will have two additional years of growing to help her catch up. We don't have the results of the x-ray back but she is scheduled to go back to him in June where we will get the results of the x-ray as well as some blood work that he wants to have done in a few months. We're prayerful that we can find some answers and that there will be a resolution as well.


Brady has also been to the doctor this past week. Since he just had a birthday, I took him in for his 7 year old check up. Just routine stuff, not anticipating much of anything. I mentioned to his pedi. about his bizarre nosebleed episodes as well as his lumberjack snoring and asked her if these two things go together and if it was just allergies and what not. She asked a few questions and then suggested he go see an ENT (ear nose throat doctor). Well two days later we're at the ENT and he strongly recommends surgery for Brady. In the doctors words, Brady's adenoid is "grossly over sized" and his tonsils are moderately enlarged. He is very concerned with Brady's respiratory rate and is very confident that he is also having episodes of sleep apnea at night. He also stated that the reasons for the nosebleeds are because he has exposed blood vessels on one side and those will have to be cauterized. The thought of putting him through another procedure after our experience this past summer with his surgery sends me into a state of convulsions. But the thought of him having respiratory problems/sleep apnea scares me a little more. The poor kid, Matthew and I were counting up in our head last night: in his 7 whole years of life he has been to the ER 5 times (that's counting the 2 different ER's we went to following his surgery last summer), has had 3 different medical procedures done which all involved cauterizing, a ride in an ambulance that included numerous stitches to the forehead and now this. And he is considered a healthy kid!


I think I will end my post here. I will try to continue to catch up with birthdays and vacations and church meetings, BEFORE Baby Johnson arrives. Please pray for us and the doctors. Please pray that we will be able to make the best decisions for the health and well-being of our children.