More To Come--Enjoy the New Posts!

WOW, I just realized how far behind I actually am! It is really late though, so I am headed to bed, plus I don't want to overwhelm anyone! :) I posted quite a bit here and on the Jake the Great & Lindstrom Fam links. Keep watching, I promise there will be more soon!

Just as an update....We ended up taking Ryan to the ER in Boise while Dawson was getting his sleeping test done. Neither one of us felt good about just letting it go and see if he felt better in a few days. It is a good thing that we didn't. They ran a lot of labs and talked to a Kidney specialist and it turns out that he had Strep in his kidneys. It was doing quite a bit of damage and his kidney's started failing. So instead of the misdiagnosis of Entero Virus, he was diagnosed with "Acute Renal Failure". Hmmm...We definitely were glad that we went for a second opinion! His function dropped to 46% and they say that another day or two and he would have needed transplants. Too bad, we haven't had enough surgery lately!

Really, we are so thankful that the Lord is mindful of us, and that he did not allow us to feel easy with the way he was feeling. We both felt a sense of urgency to get him checked out again, and we are thankful for that feeling! He is now almost back to normal. His kidneys are still not 100%, but they are showing improvement! On the upside, for Ryan, he was not allowed to help move very much, so I moved a lot of the house myself and with the help of some really great friends! We will post pictures of the new house soon.

Dawson is doing so good! He is getting so happy! It is fun to see! He runs his little legs like crazy and he is even trying to roll from side to back or side to stomach! That is so exciting! Other than one emergency run to SLC for a shunt adjustment and a trip to the PCMC ER for an infection in his G-Tube, our lives have been pretty normal. It has been nice.

Dawson is going in for quite a big surgery this next Friday. It is easy for me to say that it will be one of his biggest and probably the most unnerving! They will be doing a Nissen Fundoplication. They will detach his stomach from his spleen and make a space on the back side of his stomach and esophagus, then they will tuck the top right lobe of his stomach behind and then around his stomach and stitch it back to itself. They are going to try to do it Lapriscopically, however, they are not really sure that is going to work, where he already has so much scar tissue from his other 3 surgeries on his bowels. They will most likely give him a pretty good scar going vertically from his current horizontal scar that goes all the way across his stomach, up to his sternum. Poor baby! So many scars on his perfect little body!

The doctor talked to me for quite awhile about doing this surgery. The neurosurgeon wants us to do it for sure, because other wise Dawson can't sleep flat because of reflux, and his shunt doesn't work right unless he can lay flat. He really needs to have it done because of the damage that has been done in his esophagus from throwing up. He is just getting worse and worse because of that damage. This surgery will make it so stuff can go in, but not come back out. It is quite a nerve racking surgery. It will either make him 100% worse or completely better. We will be fasting on Friday for the latter! If you would like to join us. They will also be capping all of his teeth because of the damage done to them. The surgery starts at 9am and should last about 4-5 hours. That will be his longest yet. We also found out that he has some other issues with his testicles. When they did his hernia surgery they didn't sew them down so they healed up close to his body. This means that he will be infertile, which they say won't be an issue for him anyway, and we have an extremely high risk for Testicular Cancer. The surgery to repair that will be another 4 or so hours. We will see if we end up needing to do that or if there are other options.

Anyway, enjoy the pics below and I will work on getting more soon! Love you all! Thanks for your patience!