Monday, April 11, 2016

Hannah's 4th Birthday

Time is going at an incredible pace these days. I feel like life is a blur. It was so hard to believe this past week was Hannah Lynn's 4th birthday. Our little ballerina enjoyed her dress up station made by mommy just so special for her. Far cry from last year's birthday. I still had that darn line in my arm. So grateful to celebrate her life a little differently this year. Just enjoying the moments. So blessed to have our sweet girl in our life. What a light she brings to the world. My dearest Hannah, may you love God with all your heart and share His love with everyone.

Thanks to everyone who called, gave gifts and sent cards. She loved every bit of it. Sorry to all who called on her birthday and did not get a hold of us. My phone crashed the night before so it took me a day or so to get a new one.

Funny fact. I made all four layers of that cake, gave Hannah a bite and she promptly told me that she did not like it - then asked for a chocolate one. Really? Well sure sweet heart I guess I will make cupcakes too :)

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Friday, March 11, 2016

The Last Year In Speed Review

It was a year ago today that I was sitting in the hospital here in West Plains and wondering if I would ever leave it. Everything had been completely normal the days before going into the hospital, and as a matter of fact I had spent the previous three days shoveling our very long drive way which had gotten over a foot of snow – and yes, I was 27 weeks pregnant. I KNOW, I KNOW what you’re thinking – that’s crazy – and it may have been but I have actually done crazier things during pregnancy. I moved to Peru at 30 weeks pregnant with Hudson, and moved back to the US when I was about 7 weeks pregnant with Taylor. You would think the move back to the US would have made things easier and actually it may have just saved my life.

We left Peru in October of 2014 to come back to the States. We came back early from our “to be” three year commitment which actually only ended up being a year and half sadly.  It was an emotionally, physically and spiritually tough time on us. Our kids were sick – but not just sick – really sick. Everyone has been asking and it has taken me this long to answer, ridiculous, I know. We went through a battery of tests to figure out why our youngest two kids seemed to be wasting away before our eyes. From the minute we got back home we spent the next month off and on at the Children’s hospital in Denver. For over two months our 16 month old completely stopped eating solid foods. Our kids looked sickly and pale when we returned. Hudson christened quite a few rooms in my in-laws house with vomit. He had been throwing up for two months. I remember buying our tickets in August to leave Peru in October and it just couldn’t have come any sooner. We were wrestling with getting visa stuff through and just couldn’t leave any quicker even though my heart wanted to for my children. What was even more frustrating was not being able to find out what was wrong with them when we got back. The doctor we were working with was great, and had been following our case closely. He believed we were probably dealing with something environmental and he actually recommended we come back from a medical stand point because our kids had fallen so far under the growth curve that they were not on it anymore and he believed it would take a year or more for them to start to return back to normal. Little did we know how accurate he had been with that assessment.  They found all kinds of inflammation in the kids’ intestines. They did blood tests, genetics testing, endoscopies – you name it- we probably did it. Only to find no direct cause and my youngest was still throwing up everywhere, and not eating solids.  Only time would tell.

We found out we were pregnant with Taylor about a month or so before we left. I was excited – excited to be back where I could have access to all kinds of yummy “craving” foods. Not once did it cross my mind that this pregnancy would be my hardest – I mean I did deliver one baby in Peru, and how could you top that story. Things started going awry though in the midst of getting all the testing done on the kids. We were SO spent. So emotionally, physically and spiritually just drained, and then I started bleeding. I cannot describe what kind of crazy thoughts went through my mind at that point.  We thought we were losing the baby. I could not believe that we had moved countries, changed up our entire life to follow what we clearly knew God wanted us to do and then this. This was probably an all-time low for me.  More cramping, more bleeding and NONE of this had happened with any of my other pregnancies. The timing could not have been worse. We were still living with family and on top of that we had the director of the hospital from Peru actually visiting to do some fundraising and everyone had to know what was going on (this is just not something you feel like announcing to the world especially as it is happening). All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and sink down into a hole. True story.  That’s the closest we have ever come to losing a child – and those emotions were raw, painful and terribly real.

In the middle of ALL that- trying to figure out what was going on with our kids and possibly losing Taylor we were trying to figure out just where God wanted us in the States – and again this was another emotionally exhausting decision. Stay in CO with family or move back to MO? Tough. We were driving back and forth from CO to MO to look at what they had to offer – which was totally MISERABLE. I wish I would say I was one of those cute, bubbly, pregnant women who never ever got morning sickness, but if I told you that I would be doing an injustice to my husband who extends loads of grace to me during pregnancy. I felt like I was going to lose my stomach every five minutes on those 12 hour car rides to MO and absolutely nothing made it better. With all the other pregnancies I had had trouble with UTIs and actually had one when we returned, but of course that did not seem like a big deal then – BUT it would be later. I was measuring really big, which isn’t totally abnormal for having three going on four kids, but John was worried and I could see it in his face. I was still sick which was a good sign, pregnancy-wise, and in-between trips we got an ultrasound to find out what was going on with Taylor.  It was such a relief to see that ultrasound and that little baby bouncing around. No twins, and everything looked okay. So strange.

On Thanksgiving Hudson ate three grapes – and we were going around telling every family member how excited we were that he ate three grapes. It was the first solid food he’d eaten in months! Poor guy was so miserable.  Hannah was feeling terrible too and originally that is why we came back the first time in May of 2014, but before we left Hudson’s health took a drastic turn.

December came. I was still pregnant, which was exciting and nerve racking all at the same time. We felt we were being called to MO and not CO which was incredibly difficult. We packed up our things at the end of December and moved one snowy day to our home here in MO. We had no family living here and just a couple of friends. John and I have never backed down to adventure but this was going to get interesting.

It was a year ago today that I woke up to a terrible pain on my left side. I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Never once had anything like this happened with the other pregnancies and I tried not to let my mind wonder to the possibilities – which wasn’t too hard because I was in an incredible amount of pain. I literally could not get out of bed – I tried and fell to the floor. Immediately I called John because I thought I would have to get an ambulance. He raced home, got the kids in the car, and we raced to the hospital.  Tests confirmed I had a kidney stone – no big deal right? –WRONG. Having had two kidney stones now I can confirm I would rather go through childbirth ten more times. The good news was that it was only a kidney stone and Taylor looked great on the monitor. They gave me a bunch of pain medication, but I was running a really high fever as well so they sent off some blood cultures and started antibiotics. As the night wore on, still waiting for the stone to pass, I started to feel funny. The pain medications had helped quite a bit but my whole body started going numb, and of course this happened during the 20 minutes John had to leave my side to drop off clothes for the kids. I started having trouble breathing and even talking. My face looked like I had had a stroke. I was having an allergic reaction to one of the many pain meds I was on. I can now say I have experienced epinephrine via IV, not just the EPI pen, and let me tell you – that is an experience I will never forget. Turns out I was having an allergic reaction to a pain pill that continued to dilute in my body throughout the night which led to more epinephrine throughout the night. It was super fun – SUPER fun. I then started to have contractions, probably put on by just plain stress, which complicated things. Over the next couple of days I ran a very high fever with chills like I had never experienced, and we discovered that my body was going septic - I had infection in my blood but from what? We had to get a CT done to discover I had an abscess in my kidney. The UTI I had had in October apparently was not taken care of by the antibiotics I had been given in CO and eventually festered into an infection in my blood, developing into an abscess on my kidney.  I can remember being in the hospital barely being able to move from sheer exhaustion. I eventually left the hospital after a week, but had to be on IV antibiotics due to having an infection that was resistant to nearly every antibiotic tested – that part was so tough. I took IV antibiotics every 6 hours for 6 weeks before I delivered Taylor and another 4 weeks after I delivered her. I returned home but couldn’t do anything – I could not even change a diaper. I could not administer my own antibiotics. I could not even walk to my own kitchen without feeling like I had just run a 400m dash, huffing and puffing. We were so blessed to have my sister-in-law and her mother come and take care of the kids for a few weeks (who dropped everything to come and help when I went into the hospital) and then my mom and my dad (who stayed for another 5 weeks). We could not have made it without the friends and family who brought by food, took the kids for the weekend, and offered to come by and run my antibiotics. We had only been attending church for about a month and still so many people reached out to help us.

We spent the next days and weeks monitoring the abscess on my kidney. We had to go to Springfield to consult an infectious disease doctor. Some docs wanted to drain the abscess and some didn’t, but I was pregnant so that complicated everything. In the end they decided to do IV antibiotics until the abscess went away or until after I delivered Taylor for safety reasons. You cannot really do IV antibiotics for very long before your veins just cannot handle the poking so eventually I had to have a picc line put in my arm which was easier to use but painful and it really freaked people out because it was visible.

The rest of my pregnancy was rough. I failed my glucose test the first time and had to do the 3 hour test and barely passed that one. I started to develop preeclampsia, with high blood pressure and I started seeing spots.

We had a healthy baby girl born May23rd, the day after Caleb’s birthday. What an answer to so many prayers. Despite a septic blood infection, an allergic reaction and a kidney stone and abscess, we had a healthy baby girl. We are still so grateful. God is good.

Four days after I delivered Taylor, I went into the hospital for another week with another septic blood infection and kidney stone #2.  We spent our anniversary in the hospital running a 104 degree fever.  So this was a part of our vows 7 years before “in sickness and in health”.

I am finally feeling normal again. No picc line in my arm. I can do my own laundry, play with our kids and make my own dinner. I am so incredibly grateful to have experienced another year. I did not deserve it but God is good. His timing is perfect. We came home from Peru 18 months ago because our kids were sick but little did we know what was in store for me and for Taylor.
Our kids are doing so much better. At about the one year mark we noticed the kids have started growing again. With confidence we can say they are actually gaining weight. If you have met either of us, you know our kids will never be big people, but they are growing and for that we are grateful.  So what was the cause of the kids’ illness? We still don’t know for sure, but months after we left we read an article about dangerously high levels of arsenic and E. coli in the water in Arequipa – the same city we had done language school in Peru for 9 months. We will never know what happened or why, but we know that God always has us in his hands.


We want to say a special thanks to everyone who has helped us this past year. We are so grateful for your sacrifice and friendship.  We also want to thank our Lord Jesus for carrying us through all of the good times and all of the difficult times. We can do nothing without Him and through every experience come to know that we can trust Him, even if we may not understand it during the trials that come. 

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