Quesy stomach's beware. But really- it's not that bad.

This is my little brother's leg. I talked about him a bit in the post just before this one. He has more of those incisions all over his leg. Pretty neat huh? Or gross. Whatever floats your boat. I'll be adding more awesomely gruesome pictures once I get them uploaded! But for now. This is what you get to see.

This is what strep A does to you people! Strep-freakin-A! And this isn't even the worst of it! My dad almost lost his arm. Little brother- who's not so little really- is anxious to get out of the dang hospital. Who wouldn't be after a few weeks of family only isolation. There's only so much of one's family that one can handle. haha

Last update about Dad for at least a few weeks :) Unless there's surprises

Well, E and I have had a good stay in Oregon. I think E's trip here was drastically different than mine. He played with his Papa and Grammie quite a bit as well as with some family friends, while I enjoyed being with my family. I had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with my Dad OUT of the ICU yesterday! He was allowed to leave in the afternoon yesterday and he's doing so well that the doctor's think that he may be released today from the hospital. I am very sad that I don't get to stay the entire day, but I do have about 5 chemistry assignments due tomorrow, so it's probably for the best.

I just want to give yet another update on my dad. This will be a cumulative update. He is currently out of the hospital. They released him Sunday afternoon. Before he left, they undressed his arm and redressed it. He'll be at home for two weeks I believe. His arm will be healing with the cadaver skin on it, acting as the world's hugest and honestly, nastiest band aid. After the two weeks he'll have the cadaver skin removed and a graft of his own skin from his thigh taken and used to replace the cadaver skin. How pleasant.... now he can have a sore thigh and a sore arm.

The infection that caused so much trauma and grief was not anything intensely serious. We feel so blessed, because it could have been worse. The infection was strep and yes you can get that anywhere apparently. He could have lost his arm and he didn't; blessing #1. He could have lost muscle and didn't; blessing #2.It could have been an incredibly difficult disease to heal and it wasn't; blessing #3. He could have been in the hospital for a long time, but he was not; blessing #4. I didn't have school Friday and had a free plane ticket so I could be with my family; blessing #5. I know there have been hundreds of other blessings poured upon my Dad and our family, but there are just a few we have encountered.

Last day in the ICU!! *hopefully*

My apologies for continuing to write about the same thing these last few days. I like to keep people updated on what is happening with my Dad (grandpa). Real quick before I begin with his news.

A and Daddy are surviving quite nicely at home, I would say actually, they are thriving. Today they did their chores this morning and now they're out swimming! and then tonight they're going to have a BBQ. I think it is correct to say that we won't be missed very much. :)

Now onto the news I actually know more about. My dad should be out of the ICU tonight. He has one chest tube removed now. Which is good, because no water is collecting below his lungs on that side now! His feeding tube has been taken out and he's working on eating his own food. He's still on a massive amount of drugs. My mom says one of the drugs in his system is 100 times more powerful than morphine. :) Which means he may not ever remember us actually being here. I dropped off a picture that A drew for his Tappa, so at least he'll have a cute little picture in the room from A to look at and remind him that people have stopped by.

I am just so glad to see him getting better. If he's in a regular room by tonight, we'll get to actually stay with him longer than 1/2 hour tomorrow. If they try to make us leave, my mom, Aunt Sis and I might try to chain ourselves to his bed.

We made some "super fan" shirts for my dad. I'll have to get some pictures on here of what we did. E and my Mom's dog look the cutest in their shirts. I can't lie.

First Visit of my dad in the ICU

I am the luckiest person alive. I feel like the most blessed woman on earth-- or maybe apart of the most blessed family on earth. I know firsthand of the goodness and greatness of people's hearts. Does heaven exist here on earth? I think in little pieces it absolutely does. It exists in that purest of pure sections in our hearts. When people need care, our eternal spirits yearn to come free and love those that need loving. That little bit of our heart reminds us that great good exists in the world and especially, in all of us. There are spots all around the world where celestial love and calm can abound, and that is the temple. That is where that piece of our heart is able to expand. My family has been blessed with great love. I know I keep saying that, but I do not feel that saying it once, justifies how touched my heart has been.

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Today I flew to Oregon to be with my Dad. I arrived with my son E and nearly straightway drove to Legacy Emanuel Hospital to see my Daddy. I did not expect him to be awake. I was very certain he would still be in a drug induced coma. But as we rounded the corner, all the while my heart is nervously pounding, I see my Dad's eyes open as he looks at us. The nurse says, "He's been asking for you." How she knew that I do not know, since he still has a ventilator down his throat.

I've seen a lot of things in my life.... or at least I like to think I have seen a lot of things. Either from television shows like CSI, personal idiotic experiences, or family or friend idiot experiences. Seeing my Dad in the ICU was devastating to me, but not horrific or disgusting or tramatizing. It just made me very sad. He's my Superman. He never gets hurt. He's a brick wall... an atomic bomb. Nothing gets past him. And tonight I saw what a bacteria like Strep can do to my Superman, my brickwall and atomic bomb.

I came into the room and it felt like all of the air had been sucked out of me. It felt like my thoughts had been stolen from me, leaving my mind a blank. My Dad was lying in a bed with a tube in his nose to feed him. Cuts on his neck from various tubes that had been removed from him. A tube down his throat that was connected to two others. His eyes could not focus long. His hands and feet were swollen. He had two more tubes protruding from just below his lungs that were there to remove excess water build up. His ribs hurt him from the tubes, his throat hurt him from the tubes, and the only thing I could think was, "Get the tubes out! Can't you see they're hurting him! Get them out! Please! Please."

We stayed for a few hours; myself, my mother, and my father-in-law. We talked about what is going on and what thing is doing what for him. We tried to talk to him and I felt so hopeless as he signed to us and I did not know what the sign meant. I wanted so bad to make things easier for him and here I am unable to discern the ASL alphabet and only making it more difficult for him. I am determined to know it before I leave. After a bit, we ran out of conversational things to say, so I started to tell him about home. His eyes closed and he just listened. I told him about the little pug that E likes to play with. They're the same size and the little thing just lays E flat out on his back when he pounces on him. I told him about my Chemistry class that I am in right now and how my last test was a bust, but the teacher will just drop that completely off my grade. We talked about nothing and everything and anything being sure we did not require him to converse with us.

I love my Dad. I am grateful for a little thing like a credit card reward plan that made it possible to fly down to be with my family. I love the Lord. I love his gospel and I know more than ever now, the capacity the human heart has to love and serve.

We are going to make SuperFan shirts for our dad. All the kids will have one with our handprints on them. Kind of cheesy, but hopefully the sincerity of the idea will shine through if the shirts do not turn out so well. 

Dain Bramage

Wow two posts in one day. That almost never happens! Maybe that's why I should make posts right before I go to bed, then I'm almost guaranteed nothing new is going to happen. 

Tonight started out fairly normal. Almost everyone is grouchy for one reason or another. I'm fighting with Ayden to get him to eat his food. Ethan's upstairs because he's just being mean to everyone that looks at him funny. McKay's upstairs sick and I'm counting the minutes until I get my own time after everyone has gone to bed.

I'd just pulled Ayden's food out of the microwave, we went with the easy street tonight and had hot dogs and peas. I set them on the table in front of his booster seat, which he was standing on top of as usual. I could tell him a thousand times in one dinner and he still wouldn't listen.

I then turned away from him to get his sippie cup, turned back around to see him bouncing his bum against the back of the chair and then he was falling, crashing to the ground as the chair slid out from under him. He smashed the back of his head into the corner of our drawers and then the weight of his head forced it to muh onto our tile floor next. He started to scream. I feel that's a natural response to cracking your head against something.

About that time everything in my mind went blank, I just acted. Grabbed him, picked him up and held him. You know sometimes when you get hurt you flail around? You stub your toe and you kick/hop around. Ayden acted similarly, I guess that's a good thing, since most people do that when they get hurt. He couldn't stop kicking his legs and jerking his torso around. I set him on the counter and realized that my brain was beginning to think again.

He calmed down as far as moving his body goes, while I grabbed a fresh rag and ran it under the cold water to press against the back of his head. We then sat/stood there cuddling while I softly pressed the cold rag against the ever growing welt on the lower back of his head.

After a couple cycles of re-cooling the rag and pressing it on his bump I proceeded to inspect it. If his hair wasn't blocking it the thing would have looked grotesque. I take that back. It would have looked even more grotesque than it already did. It had swollen to the size of a golf ball, half of it was a vicious red/purple and the rest was spotted red/purple. I'm shocked and glad it didn't break the skin.

Now I just need to make sure he didn't get a concussion.  No funky eyeball business yet. I can't really guess if he sounds disoriented since he always sounds disoriented when he talks. :) I'm praying for one heck of a headache and nothing more. Hopefully the tsp of Tylenol I gave him will alleviate some of the pain.

Lucky for him, when you take a nasty spill around here, you get lovely treatment. :)

You get to eat your dinner on the couch, you get soft blankies and an icepack for the extra lump on your head and you get to watch a movie. Plus you're not required to smile for the camera!

Although we do like to try. If you look you can see his bright red ear. That apparently received some damage as well.

Ethan was collateral damage in the whole situation. In a good way that is. The movie that we weren't going to watch tonight, he now gets to watch. And he gets to cuddle with Mommy after I'm done writing this! Win win for Ethan.

Casualties of Disaster

It all started out as an innocent evening. I was cooking dinner. Went into the fridge to get some chicken out and rearranged some of the contents in the freezer. Ethan was sitting between myself at the stove and fridge playing. I glance over at the freezer door and saw that it was not closed all the way. And then. . . the ONLY glass item in there slid out like a bobsled cruising down its course, exploding on the floor with a terrifying boom.
Glass shards sprayed like shrapnel all over our floor. Poor Ethan was the closest to the mess and was sprayed with glass. Ayden of course had to see what happened and rushed over to the pandemonium, running over the glass shards. After I cleaned the mess I found glass sticking out of our wooden cupboards. Some pieces were flying so fast they embedded themselves into the wood.

Doesn't look bad there, but that's only about 1/2 the length of our kitchen and the glass chunks reached down the entire stretch.
Luckily for us the boys weren't hurt beyond just their feet. I was sure Ethan was coming out with some scratches on his face. He was of course the one that had the worst of it, but that didn't stop Ayden from milking his little cuts as well.

As I'm going to assume, you really can't see any cuts on Ayden's feet or Ethan really either. Ethan at least has the bit of blood dripping down his foot. But both boys had at least 3-4 places where the glass had cut them. Poor guys. And my poor fudge!

A Bit of a Scare

I never thought that only 30 seconds of my life could be more frightening...

Today I gave Ayden some dried fruit for his snack. He's eaten these things thousands of times and nothing has happened. But today obviously was different and merits a post because of it.

I was working on the computer and Ayden came to me choking on one of these little dried apricots. And I don't mean coughing sort of choking. Like gurgling and not breathing kind of choking. I panicked and started pounding his back over and over again. It didn't seem to be working and I started to panic more... NOT something you want to do in a situation like this! I thought maybe he's too big to be pounding him on the back, so I started to wrap my arms around him and give him the Heimlich maneuver, but just as I was about to begin, the blasted apricot spilled out of his mouth-yes, spilled, not shot- like they show in the movies. And for some reason they forget to mention or show in the movies that more than just the thing stuck in the throat comes out.

You know when you get training for stuff like that when you're younger and you actually HAVE the time to find the right spot... yeah when it really happens, not so much- I felt like I had NO time to count ribs and properly place my hands where they needed to be. I was definitely having a Mommy heart attack.

When the stupid thing came out Ayden sucked in air- thank gosh! He had tears on his face and I had spit up all over my arm. I was just so glad he was ok. I never want to experience that ever again. The sheer terror of thinking that if I can't get it out I have to call 911 and if they don't come fast enough then I could lose my little boy. 30 seconds lasts a DANG long time when you're in panic mode and it does funky stuff to your adrenaline. (duh) Once he was ok and I was starting to relax... I realized my hands were shaking and felt numb. oi! I never want to go through that again, but if I have to, at least I'll be prepared.

Because yes- yours truly is going to take a first aid class now.