Updates Galore

I have so much to fill you in on. First I'll update on Alex. He had his 9 month check up & now is 18lbs 4oz & 28 in! He gotten so big. He has 4 teeth. He is crawling all over & is just starting to pull up.

We did have a little health scare both with me & him. That is the reason for the delayed posting.

Alex had an unexplained fever for 4 days, he had no other symptoms so I just thought it was teething. He also had a doctors appointment on day 4 so I wasn't worried. Well the dr was. Fast forward to 4 hours & 6 needle sticks later we were told to wait 72 hours for a blood culture. The dr wanted to be safe & gave him a shot of antibiotics. We went home to nap & when we woke up Alex had a fever of 104.5! Of course I freaked, the nurse, however, gave me a list of things to do & called an hour later to check. Luckily I got the fever down to 100 & the dr even called an hour after that to check on him. The next day we started him on oral antibiotics & waited paiently for the blood results. The culture had been contaminated in the lab. So after chewing my nails to the quick wondering what alien illness my son had, I'll now never know. He then developed a congested cough after being on antibiotics for a week. He stills has this damn cough so today we are going back for a recheck. Hopefully there will be no more needles!

My health scare is my kidneys. If you look back on my post from a year ago, I almost spent Christmas in the hospital due to a kidney stone. The pain left & we assumed I passed it. The week after Alex was born I thought I had a bladder infection from the catheter, the dr agreed & antibiotics were consumed. I spent the next 3 months trying every antibiotic there was to get rid of the stupid infection. My ob decided she was tired of me & sent me to a urologist who not so quickly disovered my malfunction. The stone we thought I passed was actually lodged in my ureter blocking urine from entering my bladder on the left side. The urine, since it couldn't escape, kept backing up into my kidney causing a major infection. I had several nights where my husband was ready to drive me the hospital, the fevers were awful 103+. After several scans it was determined that I had so many stones it was going to require 2 surgeries. The first surgery was to remove the stone that was blocking my ureter. The surgery itself wasn't so bad but the stent that stayed in for a week was a torture that I don't wish on anybody!! The best way I can describe it is to imagine a PVC pipe cut with a hand saw shoved up your wazoo & with each step it rubs. Yeah, real fun! The 2nd surgery was a whole lot more involved. Since the stones were so large, golf ball size (no I'm not exaggerating) I had to have open kidney surgery. The surgeons went in through my back to remove 6 stones from my left kidney. I was at the point to where just a month delay in surgery could have cost me my kidney. The stones were so large that parts of my kidney were not functioning. My right one also needs the surgery but they are waiting for some further testing. Our current goal is to determine why I am growing such extremely large stones. The dr's are baffled because 1-I'm a girl 2-I'm young 3-They are freakin' HUGE! We are talking case study people! The right kidney, luckily, is in a lot better shape then my left one was. So we have some time for investigation.

So that's what I've been up to. I need to write a post about Alex's Christening. I just realized that I never did that. It was in July. I kinda suck at this blogging thing. Well time to run, I have to get in the shower before Alex wakes up & requires my undivided attention!