Hanging out with Daddy

John is spending this evening receiving IV fluids at Children's in Columbia, hanging out with his daddy watching tv and 'helping' daddy read a book ;)

It's been a long couple of days around here, but we do finally know some of what is going on. John was not doing well yesterday morning, slept until 11 then was loopy and tired and weak and finally after a couple hours of sitting in his chair playing as much as he could he was ready to go back to bed. He was still signing, and had that bright effervescent smile but something was wrong and both he and I knew it, we just didn't know what to do about it. Mark was gone to the circuit pastors meeting but when he got home and John was ready to get back up it was readily apparent that something just wasn't right. We took him into Columbia to see Dr. Beal, John's pediatrician, but upon examination he looked fine, just weak, tired and a little bloated. We took him for labs and by then he was starting to feel much better so we went out to dinner, during which John was a riot so we were hoping that this morning all would be past and we would be back to normal.

Unfortunately this morning came and normal did not. John was again tired, weak and drifted off into a fog now and again. We called the pediatrician again to check on lab values and just to let them know that he was still not feeling good, or rather not feeling good again. The lab values, while not great, weren't horrific either. I think this was more scary than not, as bad lab values would have given us a clear indication of what was wrong, but with the labs being in at least the okay range it looked like what we were seeing was seizures again. After talking to the neurologists nurse and waiting things out for while, John got progressively weaker and finally started throwing up. At that point we spoke with the pediatricians at Children's in Columbia and left for the ER.

Most of the trip to Columbia, an hour or so drive, John was very tired and weak enough that he couldn't hold up his own head, but about the time we got to the high way he perked up and was ready to have the reading light 'on' and the visor mirror 'open', both of which he signed for appropriately and to have some of the 'red drink' that we had - Coke of course! He was bright and doing well for a while and then started throwing up again and after that he was just wiped out and went to sleep for the rest of the ride.

At the ER he threw up several more times and finally, after a couple hundred ml's of IV fluids were in he was sitting up in the bed, playing with things and getting back to normal. This time his lab values were bad. At least this is something that we know what to do to fix!

So what we know for the moment is that John caught some kinda bug that caused the puking and resulting dehydration, we are also pretty sure that the other things that we saw were neurological, but after talking to a doc that has been with John through all of his adventures in the hospital of late, we are somewhat assured that even though what we saw was most likely neurological, it was very much less severe than the last 'attack' and that one was less severe than the previous and so forth, so it does at least give the impression that it is something that is healing, yet not healed right now.

What we don't know is if the amount of activity that John has had, the fatigue level of life this last several days has contributed to his problems both neurological and bug/dehydration. We hope to get some insight into this from the docs before John comes home this time.

It's been a pretty hard couple of days for a little guy, a pretty scary couple of days for his parents and we all have reached this part of it trying our very hardest to remember that John is in Christ's hands and that God's Will for John is perfect in every way, even if we don't understand it all the time and get scared in the middle. So we go to bed tonight hoping that tomorrow brings more news, hopefully good, and with the prayer on our lips for mercy and sanity for our little silly boy and his overly silly parents.