David has such an incredible imagination and capacity to learn and create stories. He continually amazes me and constantly entertains me. In addition to his love of trains he has a love of space. This is in response to his father's love of space and the fact that Dan watches tons of the shows about it. If I watch a show David says "change it to my show". If daddy watches a show David sits down and is fascinated. In fact, so much so, that even when daddy's not here he asks to watch those shows. He's the only 4-year-old I know who watches Discovery Channel and NASA Space DVD's by request. Along with this absorption of information about planets, stars, space ships, etc. he makes up stories. He'll start by telling you how the sun doesn't go up and down to make day and night. The earth spins and that's how we get day and night. Then he'll go into this bizarre "made-up" story and go on and on and on. I need to write a couple of his stories down and save them in his memory book - that will be a cute story years from now.
Arlene (Emily's mom) and I took her to Children's Hospital in Birmingham Thursday to meet with the Pediatric Endocrine specialist. We liked the doctor alot - she was very nice, compassionate, clear spoken, etc. Emily has Grave's Disease (google it if you want). It is a pretty straightforward hyperthyroid situation. Her last labs showed her making 4 times the normal amount of the hormone, hence the symptoms we have been seeing along with quite a few others that we had no idea were attributable to this. There are a few treatment options, but we decided we would go the route of oral medication to start. She will take it 3 times a day and it should stop her thyroid from producing all this excess. The dosage may have to be tweaked as time goes on and there is a small chance she may not be able to take it at all. The doctor will do regular blood work to see how Em's responding to the medicine. She will take this medicine... actually forever, unless she has a bad reaction, we opt for an alternative treatment or she goes into remission (30% chance). One of the particularly dangerous side effects of Graves Disease / hyperthyroidism is racing heart / palpitations / rapid heartbeat / or whichever you call it. A normal resting heart rate is 60 - 100. Emily's was 158 the other day. They took it several times. This was after watching TV. Until the new medicine has a chance to "kick-in" she will also take a medicine to help lower her rate. For the next month until we get that aspect under control she is on "rest". No dance, no running, no jumping, nothing to get hot, no rough-housing or flips in the pool - only lounging. She is supposed to stay cool and relaxed. Since her resting heartbeat was so high - it is very dangerous to think what it could be if she was active. Dance starts back on July 7th, which is a little under a month away. The doctor said to call her and she would let us know if Emily could be released or not. She is taking blood every week for the first month or so. This will give her a real time picture of how the medicines are working.
I've got to share a couple of God moments, as Christy calls them :) related to this. Normally this is diagnosed in women around age 20. The doctor said we were unusual and lucky to have diagnosed this so soon. Well think about it - the only reason it came up is because of some slight swelling at her neck. I know God put that there to warn us. Next - we weren't supposed to be able to get into the specialist until sometime in August. They had a cancellation, which is how we got the appointment this past Thursday. If there had been no cancellation, if we had let Emily proceed with her normal active lifestyle and do the 3-hour per day dance practices and dance camp... there is no telling what would have happened to her, probably cardiac arrest. God set up that cancellation for us so we could keep her safe!!! Thank you all my prayer warriors. Please keep it up.
Well all else is going great around here. Spent alot of time this week with friends and with the pool, LOL. I'm going to do a little work and then go junk store shopping.
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