The water pictures are a few Tom took at the hotel in Marshfield. He watched Noah Amaya and Kindra while Anna had her appointments and procedure last week, and was able to take some awesome pictures underwater with his new camera. Anna couldn't have anything to eat or drink until after her procedure, which wasn't even scheduled until 2:15PM!! So, we kept her busy in the pool to keep her mind off of how hungry she was!
I know, I still owe you Christmas pictures...maybe I'll get a chance to do that this weekend!
We have been receiving a lot of phone calls and emails, and I am sorry I've not been able to get in touch with everyone. We have been incredibly busy, but things are finally headed in the right direction, I think!
Pavan is healing nicely after his surgery last Thursday, but he is still having a lot of pain in his shoulder. Now that he's having to rely more on his left arm, he is also having more pain in his broken elbow. Poor guy! To top it all off, he's going crazy sitting around the house all day every day...but when he tries to do much of anything, he ends up hurting from the effort! He is able to work on the basic physical therapy exercises that were given to him just after his surgery, and hopefully we'll get some organized PT set up when he sees the surgeon next week for his follow up appointment.
Anna is feeling much better, in spite of all of our efforts, really! She started feeling better two days before her appointment in Marshfield, but we went ahead with the appointment and the EGD since this has been going on for 3 months now. The doctor we saw was amazing, very nice, very knowledgeable. I felt very comfortable letting him do the scope, and knew if anyone was going to give us some answers, he was the guy! We got biopsy results back yesterday. The biopsies in the stomach showed chronic active gastritis. Gastritis is sort of a catch all phrase that describes an inflammation of the stomach lining, it can be caused by many different things and we aren't really sure what set Anna's off to begin with (testing showed it was NOT H.Pylori). But once this inflammation started the stomach acid was very irritating to that inflamed tissue and never allowed it to heal.
The biopsies in the esophagus showed erosive esophagitis. They could tell that the lining of her esophagus had sloughed off recently, and could see new cells beginning to grow back. So when the gastritis was really bad, it caused the stomach acid to enter her esophagus over and over again, causing that tissue to erode. OUCH! No wonder she was in so much pain!
Anna is taking prevacid for the next three months to significantly reduce the amount of stomach acid she produces, allowing the gastritis and esophagitis to resolve. Hopefully this will take care of the problem. If she continues to have symptoms when she is taken off the prevacid, we will have to go in for further testing. But for now, she is back to normal, so we are taking things one day at a time!
Oh, one more interesting thing we learned is that Anna is definitely not lactose intolerant, they were able to test the enzyme levels in her stomach and determine that, isn't that neat!
Well now that Christmas Break is officially over, and everyone is feeling better, we are back into the full swing of things with the children's activities. Monday nights we drive to Weston, WI for gymnastics lessons for Anna. It's an hour and a half down, and hour and a half in class, and an hour and a half back home. Tuesday nights we have dance class for Anna, Noah, and Amaya in Merrill, WI. It's about 50 minutes to get there, 2 hours of lessons, and 50 minutes back home. Wednesday it's back to Weston for gymnastics again...Thursday Noah and Amaya have swim class at the YMCA. Every other week we try to get Anna back down to Weston for a private lesson and open gym for a few hours. And on Saturday we all crash, haha! It will be nice if we can ever find a job in a bigger city...what would I do with all my free time if their classes were only 10 minutes away!!
Kindra is keeping busy, as always. She is attending a meeting after school today to look into joining the forensics team, which is drama and debate. I think she'd do great at both of those activities...Lord knows she's dramatic, and loves to debate!
Better get going, have a few errands to run before I pick up the kids from school.
More later,
Rebecca
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