Roller Coaster Ride

(Originally posted on our family blog on 01/30/13)

 

Today has been a serious roller coaster ride.  Actually, this entire month has been a monster roller coaster ride.  Get comfortable.  It's a LOOOONG ride.

 

I guess I should update just a little bit before I get into the "ride." This actually happened right before Christmas but it's all been part of the same roller coaster - we all got the flu.  I got it first with S a close second.  He and I were both sick for quite a while.  He ended up getting pneumonia as well.  NOT fun.  I ended up with a major ear infection.  I still can't hear fully out of my right ear.  I'm hoping it will come back soon and it does seem to be getting a tiny bit better but man, it's annoying!  R and M came down with it next followed closely by Josh.  C managed to avoid the plague, although I'm not sure how.  It seemed to pass really quickly for Ryley but Maddie ended up with double ear infection.  It hit Josh pretty hard too but luckily he had already planned to take time off for Christmas and New Year's so he didn't have to miss a bunch of work.  Altogether I think we were sick over here for about 5 weeks.  And we all got flu shots this year - not a guarantee, apparently!

 

Meanwhile, while all of this sickness is going on we get a referral.  Two, actually!  These two referrals were from the Special Focus list which means they've been on the Special Needs list for longer than 3 months, they are older children, they have more significant special needs, or any or all of the above.  Because they are the "Special Focus" children the rules are a little more lax and we can get the referrals before we have all of our dossier documents in China.  We considered both of them very carefully and prayerfully and finally decided that we should accept one of the referrals.  It was very hard to say no to the other one but it was the right decision.  

 

So, the one we did accept:

 

Her estimated birthdate is October 23, 2010.  Her name is Su Yin Xiao. Su is for the city she was found in, Suzhou (Jiangsu Province).  Yin is for the year she was found 2010.  Xiao is for "hoping she laugh all the time."  We will name her "E" Yin Xiao.  She is about one month older than S but is very developmentally delayed (all institutionalized children usually are) so she will seem much younger than him.  She is very small, about 18 pounds, and has a cleft palate and microtia of the right ear.  Microtia literally means little ear.  She was born without a full auricle.  She has two little nubs of skin and/or cartilage where the ear would be.  She most likely has atresia of that same side as well, which means that there is no ear canal.  We don't know for sure that she has atresia although it seems very likely given the level of microtia she has.  We do know for sure that she has significant hearing loss on the right side so that also makes the diagnosis of atresia likely.  We have 3-4 pictures of her and we got some videos a couple of weeks ago that are so precious.  In the paperwork that we got with her referral it said that she was close to walking but was still holding onto something, but in the videos she is walking all on her own so that was great news. She is in a big city in a very large orphanage that is known for being a good orphanage so that is a comfort.  We are so excited and can't wait to go get her!

 

Meanwhile, shortly after Josh started feeling better he started feeling worse.  He had 3-4 nights of a lot of back pain and we suspected kidney stones.  I made him go to the doctor and sure enough, big ol' kidney stones, three to be exact (6mm, 2mm and 2mm).  The next two weeks were filled with a lot of pain for Josh, doctor's visits and a couple of CT scans and x-rays.  He was scheduled for lithotripsy (procedure for blasting the blasted stones with sonic waves and lasers) and stent placement on January 21.  He had that done and spent the next two days in bed.  He had the stent removed two days after the surgery ----> stents are AWFUL and removal of them isn't much fun either.  He felt pretty good the rest of that day and into the next and even went to work.  On the evening of the 24th he started to have a lot of pain.  He came home from home teaching around 8 and took his pain medicine (Naproxen) hoping that he'd just waited to long to take it.  After an hour it hadn't done anything.  He called the Dr. at 11:30 and he told Josh he could double up on the dosage of Vicodin so he took two of those.  I wanted to take him to the ER at this point but he didn't want to go.  I called his mom to come over and stay with the kids anyway.  She was on her way home from picking up our brother-in-law and niece from the airport and just happened to be already in the car and 5 minutes away.  ;) Our brother-in-law was able to give Josh a blessing.  We hoped that would help Josh and let him sleep a little but his body had different plans.  He suffered for 2-3 more hours until about 2:30 am when he finally gave in and let me take him to the ER.  Roxi was already in the loop about things so I called her and she came right over.  Sawyer, of course, decided it was time to wake up and party right at this time too.  I put him back in bed and told Roxi I didn't know how Sawyer would react to her coming in his room if he woke up again so she could try to wake up M if he freaked out.  She ended up having to wake up Maddie so I don't think Roxi ever got back to sleep because I'm pretty sure neither S nor M went back to sleep.  S ended up falling asleep on the floor about 10 am the next morning so I know he was up waaaay too early.  But, I digress. . . I took Josh to the ER and after what seemed like an eternity they finally hooked him up with some morphine.  That did nothing.  He got another dose about 15 minutes later along with some other kind of pain killer.  That did nothing.  They finally brought in some Dilaudid.  That finally worked!  Hallelujah.  He was finally able to relax and get the x-rays done and sleep a little.  I still can't believe how much medicine he had taken in a 12-hour timespan and nothing had worked.  The ER Dr. said he thought it was from the ureter spasming after the stent removal.  (Stent = Stupid Torturous Evil Nothing-good-will-come-from-this Tool-from-hell.)  But Josh passed several large fragments right before we left the ER so it could have been the spasm or passing the large fragments or both.  Either way he's just glad it's over.  We got home around 7 am and relieved Roxi.  I am so thankful to live near our parents!!!  I don't know what I would have done otherwise. Josh went to bed and I got ready for the day.  I finally had to crash for a couple of hours after I got the baby down for his nap.  Josh is doing really well now and hopefully it will stay that way!

 

Meanwhile, as all of this kidney stone junk is happening, we decide we should move.  Yes, we're crazy.  We knew this was probably in our future but we planned on it happening in a year or two after the babies are home.  But after thinking about it quite a bit more and lots of prayer we decided that before they come home might actually be better - less stress on them and me (who wants to show a house with 6 kids jammed in it along with all their stuff? Not me!) So we get the ball rolling on selling our house and start looking for another one.  We found one and put an offer on it, had it accepted and then after the inspection we just started feeling like it was NOT the right choice, so we backed out of it this morning.  We're still selling our house though.  Should go on the market tomorrow!  I have no idea where we're going to go though so that's just adding to the stress.  I've been packing and purging like a crazy woman for the past two weeks.  We did the staging and touch up paint yesterday and today so it's as ready as it will ever be.  Anyone want to buy a house?

 

Meanwhile, as all of this dossier-prep/kidney stone/moving/looking for a house is going on we finally get our approval letter from USCIS (Homeland Security).  We were anticipating this arriving soon so I got all our other dossier documents together in between dealing with all this other stuff.  We were able to send off our dossier to our adoption agency last Friday, January 25th.  We had been told that as soon as Lily (the lady on the Chinese end looking for possible referrals for our agency) had our dossier in her lap she could start searching for us.  Imagine our surprise when we get another referral on Monday afternoon!  We had just FedEx'ed the package to Houston on Friday so IFS didn't even get it until Monday morning and we had a referral by 2:30 on Monday!  Crazy.  Lily had been informed that we had all our dossier documents to our agency and that must have been enough for her - yay!  

 

Here's the info on our second girl:  Her name is Zhao Cheng Nan.  We will name her "G" Cheng Nan.  We weren't given any information on her name but we do know a little about her background.  Her estimated birthdate is March, 20, 2012, so she is only about 9 months old.  She was abandoned at the gate of the orphanage in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, on May 3, 2012.  So her parents (or someone) had her for about six weeks.  I can only guess about this but I think they realized her special need would need a major surgery that they probably couldn't afford and so they had to give her up. After six weeks for having her - how devastating would that be?!  I cannot imagine.  She was born with meningocele which is a form of spina bifida.  It would have been very visible from birth and her parents would have known something was wrong right away.  We don't know much but it seems like a very mild case of meningocele because the severe ones need an operation right away and she didn't have that.  She did have a surgical repair this past October and she is doing very well.  The nannies at her orphanage report that she is moving her legs and they can't tell a difference between her and the other children. We don't know anything else about her condition right now but we feel very blessed to have gotten a referral that is so young.  I was getting really worried that I would have three 3-year-olds running around and I'm not sure I'm ready for triplets!  At least they will all be at somewhat different stages.

 

The pinnacle of highs and lows of this crazy month-long roller coaster ride was today.  We accepted the referral for G yesterday morning and knew that we had to write a letter called a Care and Rehabilitation Plan to send to China.  It's basically all about who we are and who we want to adopt and how we will care for her with specifics like Dr.'s that we will take her to and specific treatments, etc.  I had most of the letter done and I just needed to find some specific information on Dr.'s specializing in this in our area before I could turn it in.  I was waiting to talk to a good friend that had spina bifida for her recommendations before I wrote the letter.  As I was making dinner tonight we got a call from Kim at the adoption agency.  She said she needed that letter.  Like NOW, as in YESTERDAY. I told Josh how to finish making dinner (haha - see below for how that turned out) and ran upstairs to finish off the letter and send it.  I had it done within about 5 minutes and Kim emails me back saying she'd sent it off to China and that she didn't know if we'd make it in time but she was praying the timing would work out.  I was SO scared that I had messed up this referral and that G be given to someone else.  (When you get a referral the child is locked out of the Special Needs List for 48 hours so that you can have time to review the file and either choose or decline, but when that time is up the child goes back on the list for anyone else to pick.)  

 

I managed to finish dinner and eat but I felt so sick and terrified that I had messed this up.  I was seriously a mess.  Josh tried to distract me by offering to take us all to Dairy Queen but not even ice cream could distract me (it was that bad!)  As he's packing up the kids to take them out for ice cream he comes in to say goodbye to me and I open my email to see that Kim has emailed - we were just in time and she's definitely ours.  I start crying hysterically out of relief and Josh is so confused thinking we'd for sure lost her.  He's frantically trying to hold onto me while searching my email for Kim's reply and he finally sees that she's ours and he starts crying too.  I can only liken the amount of relief I felt at that point to one thing - the relief of giving birth.  A laughing, crying, exhausted relief.  Seriously.  Some crazy highs and lows today!

 

And all of this, except for the start of the flu, happened in January.  I cannot wait until January is over.  I'm not sure I can take much more!

 

Oh, and if you want to know about dinner. . . I was making a cheese sauce when we got the call.  I was whisking the roux and it was done so I quickly added the milk and told Josh to whisk it until it thickened and started to boil.  Then he was to add ONE handful of cheese and stir that it after taking it off the heat.  I run upstairs, do my thing and come back down to see a mess.  He managed to get the sauce thickened and to a boil.  Instead of one handful (approx 1 cup) of cheese he added the whole container which was probably closer to 3 cups of cheese.  This makes for a seriously thick and goopy cheese sauce.  Luckily I was adding the cheese sauce to something else so that thinned it a little but dinner was SO cheesy it was hard for me to eat much but that could also have been because the pit in my stomach.  The kids and Josh liked it though.  I do have to give Josh credit - he tried.  And he listened to most of my instructions.  I'm thankful for that.  He's a keeper but I'll probably make the cheese sauce from now on.