A serious case of the sickies :(

The last few weeks have been rather rough. We've gone from sickness to sickness and I am once again a very firm believer in the phrase "When it rains it pours"! Everything actually started in August when I took the girls in for their 1-year check-up. Emmalyn had an ear infection that ended up lasting the entire month of August. We went through two oral antibiotics (which she hates) and in the end had to do Rocephin shots. Those were brutal, I had to take her in three days in a row and get a shot each day...needless to say by the third day she was NOT happy about going into the doctor's office again since she knew what was coming. Poor thing! Luckily the shots worked at her ear FINALLY cleared up.

About a week later we took a trip down to Richfield, UT for Jeff's Great Aunt Mary's 80th birthday party. When we left that morning everything was just fine, but an hour or too after we got to Richfield I noticed Emmalyn had a lot of goobers in her right eye. At first I just wrote it off as allergies acting up in a different place, but by the time we left the park (and after cleaning her eye out every 10 minutes or so) her eye started to swell and turn red - as you can see in the pic below:


When we got to our hotel I called my mom and she told me it sounded like pink eye...great! So Jeff went to Walmart just down the street and talked to the pharmacist there and confirmed that it was probably pink eye but said he couldn't give us anything without a doctors prescription. Long story short, Jeff got a hold of a local eye doctor in Richfield, explained the symptoms and the doctor was nice enough to talk to the pharmacist to get us an antibiotic for Emmalyn. We are so grateful for that gracious doctor and him saving us a $200 ER bill!!

That next Monday Jeff and I both woke up with colds and of course it passed on to the girls. So we all had headaches and coughing and sniffling all over the place. I tried so hard to keep things clean and sanitized. I thought I was doing pretty good since Brooklyn didn't seem to catch the pink eye...that is until Friday, Sept. 17, that's when all hell broke loose. Jeff got a phone call from his boss and HR that morning informing him that he was being RIFed (reduced in force, aka laid off), his last day is tomorrow (Oct 1). Needless to say Jeff didn't feel much like working the rest of the day so we headed out to his mom's house. While I was out running some errands with Jeff's mom and sister we noticed Brooklyn had some goobers in her eye...ugh! I called the pediatrician right away and got her in that afternoon. Luckily the doctor checked Emmalyn out while we were there as well and she found yet another ear infection. We decided to take Emmalyn to an ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) Specialist and see what he thought about putting tubes in her ears. Luckily they were able to squeeze us in (since we'll be loosing our insurance) that next Tuesday and did the surgery on Wednesday. Here are some cute pictures...

Pre-op

I don't think anybody could make a hospital gown look so adorable!!

Resting on my lap in Post-op

Unfortunately on Tuesday night (the night before the surgery...which we had to be at the hospital at 6:00 AM for) both girls came down with the flu. They each threw up at least 6 or 7 times, if not more. So off to the insta-care we went...they just told us it was a stomach virus and to try and keep them hydrated. Emmalyn was doing okay Wednesday morning so they went ahead with the surgery, since it's such a simple one and she handled it like a champ! Of course I wasn't feeling very well all day Wednesday and being really tired from a late night/early morning it was a bit rough. That evening Jeff started feeling queasy and ended up throwing up a couple of times that night. So for 4-5 days we all basically lived off of toast, applesauce, crackers, Gatorade/Sprite (for Jeff and I), Pedialyte (for the girls), and the occasional banana.

Luckily it has all passed, as far as we can tell, and I'm PRAYING that we are done for awhile!!

Too close to home

You know those things that you hear about that happen to people, both good and bad, and you always think "Oh that will never happen to me or anyone I know." Well one of those things has happened to some one I know, someone I'm close to, someone who's been a really good friend to me and last night as I walked into her hospital room in the ICU and I had a huge reality check.

Last Saturday (8/28), while her husband, Dustin, was at the store and her son, Ryker (1), was napping in his bed, my dear friend Christy fell down her stairs and hit her head really hard. So hard, in fact, that she fractured her skull and has had a lot of bruising, bleeding and swelling in her brain. After three surgeries and 12+ CT Scans she in stable but still in very critical condition. Just yesterday they tried to take her breathing tube out but there was so much swelling and mucus that she was having a very difficult time breathing on her own and her windpipe started to collapse. So they had to sedate her again and re-insert a new, smaller breathing tube. Her ICP (internal cranial pressure) has gotten better, but still fluctuates up and down. She is responsive to her husband and others through head nods/shakes and hand squeezes. She even squeezed my hand as I held it and talked to her for a minute.

It was very hard to see her like that. Words cannot express the grief and remorse that spread over me. I don't know what I had expected to see, but that was just a major reality check as to just how bad of shape she's really in. She's currently in a stable but still very critical condition and it's still in the fluctuating state.

I pray for her every day, multiple times a day. Please pray for her and her family to be able to make it through this rough time.

Here is a blog on Christy's status.
http://prayersforchristy.wordpress.com/

Please help with a donation to the Ericksen's in this time of trial.

Thank you