4/15 Update

4/15 update

Thanks for all of your prayers, kind responses, visits, offers to help, 4 square hospital meals thanks to the brownies that Suzanne and Scott brought up today, great plants/flowers, and anything else I might be missing. By my tally on the spreadsheet I have created we could accept one kind offer from each that has offered and have babysitting once per week until our youngest child is through junior high (and who knows when that last one will come!), not have to cook a dinner until after Christmas, have play dates for all our kids until they are married, not have to mow the yard throughout the growing season (I might be pushing it there), and we have a standing offer of an arranged marriage for the daughter you have been all praying about (but I would have to be willing to accept an inter-religion marriage (rude, inside joke to offerer). I will be sending you a meeting request for your time slot( mostly kidding).

After a non-eventful sonogram this morning and another one this evening with a couple of strangers who had not poked and electronically internally probed Pamela and our daughter yet, we had a heart to heart with Dr. Johnson. As an aside, when two doctors are watching a sonogram together they speak a shorthand code that reminds me a lot of two brothers that we would play basketball with sometimes at the rec back in Mesquite during high school. They would talk pig latin so fast to tell each other what to do next that you could not possibly interpret what they were saying unless pig latin was your native tongue. I can figure out an occasional acronym, listening to the doctors, but I don't have an ear for it.

You know, I think I know how it feels to talk about skydiving for a long time and then suddenly it is the night before your skydive is scheduled. Dr. Johnson talked with us this evening about it really being time to decide between just waiting and watching and going ahead and trying to take steps to find out more about what is going on and hoping to find a diagnosis that we can either take action on or be better prepared to take action on once our daughter is born. You may remember that this procedure, taking a blood sample from the umbilical cord, is not without risk. I am normally the optimist in our family but Pamela this evening has been great to point out the positive outcome side versus the risk. We have in the neighborhood of a 90% chance of success tomorrow morning. While they are there, if anemia is found they will give our daughter a transfusion to address that. That does not fix the reason for the anemia but it will help help her. The need could arise every couple of weeks for an additional transfusion because the anemia can return if the underlying problem is not addressed.

The procedure is scheduled for 9:00 am and we are already up too late. Pamela is hooked up to the monitors for a while to make sure everything is ok before we go to sleep. She is and has been having minor contractions so pray that those stay very minor or just go away. Please pray for Dr.'s Johnson, Moice, Pappana, others that will be on standby in case of need, the nurses, the aenestithilogistasaurus (I'm pretty sure that is how you spell it) and everyone there. Of course, please pray for my incredible wife and our precious daughter.

If you want to read some of our guidance on this you can read Philippians 4, Ephesians 1, Psalm 103, Mark 5, and any other number of passages. It is pretty cool how every thing comes back to and is often referenced in these and other passages to bringing glory to God and everything coming from Jesus. We want to bring glory to Him, period. Jesus often prayed The Word and quoted The Word so where else could we go to ask for guidance?

We have a couple of things going for us that we didn't have at this time last week. We have a echo cardiogram that shows that our daughter has a heart that is working hard but in good shape overall, we have a right lung that is still expanded now as opposed to being crushed by the fluid in the area, we have multiple sonograms by multiple people that verify that there are issues that have not been able to find a root reason for despite local, national, and international experts being consulted, and, far from least, we have a legion of believers interceding on our behalf who, the Bible tells us, are actually being interceded for by the Holy Spirit himself with groanings too deep for words.

I have found great humor in the fact that of everything I have said in these emails that one thing that got more responses than anything else was an observation of a certain hand signal associated with a certain University that was noticed (or perhaps imagined) during an sonogram. I am pretty sure that got some people praying for the wrong thing and possibly even got me written up at work. Well, at least they were praying. :-)

Our daughter is moving around a lot and messing with the monitoring and keeping us awake longer than we had hoped. Aunt Sharon, BroRan, and anyone else getting this late might pray for a restful night for Pamela. I still have 25% of a 9X13 pan of brownies to down.

To borrow a line from Paul, Rejoice in the Lord always. And again, I say Rejoice!
We look forward to rejoicing with you all tomorrow.
Terry

one last item...Pamela is now experiencing greater lower extremity swelling than she had with either Colton or Luke and she would appreciate your prayers with her dealing with that.