Blog Archive

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Aunties, Uncles & Cousins, OH MY!

We had a wonderful time during a week long visit from my sister and her family. Elizabeth & Ruby loved playing with "the cousins" every day all day and miraculously we all slept well, stayed relatively healthy and even managed to make it out of the house a few times! Some of the highlights were:

~Visiting the St. Louis Zoo and enjoying and ice cream treat
~Feeding the Coi fish at the Botanical Gardens
~A birthday party for the Braun cousins at the Cupcakery
~Long walks, playing in the park and lots and lots of reading, dancing, playing dress up and
~our niece Eiley asking her mom if she could have surgery...(apparently Elizabeth's scars were pretty impressive)...and then after hearing what surgery actually involved...saying, "Mom, We need to pray for Elizabeth more!"
~A wonderful date night...adults only, thanks to our sweet babysitter.
~The fact that after 8 days, we were all sad to say goodbye...the visit was perfect from one end to the other.

Svea & David's Visit

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Long but successful day

Thanks so much for your prayers and emails of encouragement! It means so much to us to know you're thinking of us on days like these. Elizabeth did beautifully today we arrived at 9am and finally left at 5pm, but all in all things went smoothly. As we anticipated, her procedure got pushed back and she finally got wheeled away at noon.  The GI felt good about what he saw: increasingly scarred over veins in her esophagus (which are less at risk of rupturing and causing a life threatening bleed). He had to inject two which looked like they could bleed soon, but overall feels like we're "making progress". The long term plan is to continue doing an endoscopy with sclarotherapy every 4-6 weeks for 4-6 months in a row and then take a break for 6 months or so and repeat the cycle until her varices go away...most likely when she's in her early teens all the while, praying she doesn't have a bleed in the middle of all this and require us to go to plan B.

We've also had some new developments that we're still processing:
*Monday we learned that Elizabeth has conductive hearing loss in one or both ears and will need amplification (hearing aides) once we do further "ear specific" tests. Would you join us in praying for complete healing for Elizabeth's hearing by the next test on April 15th?
*It appears that Elizabeth sprained her ankle at some point this week! While we were at the hospital today they were able to do x-rays and an ultrasound to confirm that it's not a hairline fracture or a clot, so that's a relief, but the poor thing has been limping for 2 days and yet we have no idea how it happened!
*We've got 2 more appointments tomorrow and Matt and I have a conference call with a specialist on Saturday who might be able to give us some input on possible speech therapies for Elizabeth...so we'll see.

It was a long day, we're glad to be home and eager to see the end of this long week...
Blessings,
Sara

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Elizabeth's Endoscopy Tomorrow

We're halfway through a big week for Elizabeth. She had 3 appointments on Monday and 2 today, has an endoscopy scheduled for tomorrow morning and 2 more appointments scheduled for Friday. She's been a trooper throughout and we would appreciate your prayers for a smooth procedure tomorrow. Her scopes are usually scheduled for first thing in the morning and this one isn't until 10:00am (so more likely 11:00ish) and that means she won't be able to eat at all, and won't get any water after 7:00am. Would you keep us in your prayers tomorrow? Ruby will hang out with Sophie and Matt will have a busy day of work, so it'll just be Elizabug and me and we're praying for a grace-filled day.

We'll let you know how it goes. In the mean time, If you want to see a hilarious video of Elizabeth, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyww30LIxQA

Love,
Sara & Matt