Ammon's Life Flight Friday 2/29

Good thing Leap Year only comes once every four years. We can't take another day like today for a very long time.

How much unexpected news can you get in one day and not believe that it must be some sick cosmic confusion? Friday's bad news kept coming long after I started screaming for it to STOP!

It started with a phone call from my husband as he drove to pick me up from the airport so that we could go to Primary Children's Medical Center in SLC for Ammon's long awaited consultation on his test results.

At 8:30 am I got the call that my husband was having to pull off the freeway as Ammon was having a seizure that would not stop. He was turning blue and was having great difficulty breathing. Luckily there was a hospital close at hand and he was able to rush Ammon to the ER where he was given highest priority. By that time he wasn't breathing. The doctors were very concerned about him going into cardiac arrest. Ammon was intubated and injected with multiple medications and finally started breathing on his own again. He was stablized enough to be put into the Life Flight helicopter and sent to Primary Children's.

I stood outside and watched as the helicopter flew towards the hospital and then landed. It was extremely frightening to experience. I am continually grateful that when he did have the seizure and stopped breathing they were not in one of the many rural stretches miles and miles long where no medical service is available. Had they been, Ammon would not be here sitting on my lap now.

Thank you for your prayers and your positive thoughts for him. He certainly was being watched over.

As he lay in the ER sleeping, we met with the neurological team and got our next grim surprise. Ammon has seizure activity from both sides of his brain. I never thought I would be so disappointed that my child can't have half his brain removed. Too much of his brain is involved for surgery to be a likely option. He have one last medication to try and if that doesn't work, Ammon has no other options at this point than to live with this monster in his brain...and to never be more than 15 minutes away from an emergency room. Then we'll wait for medical science to make more discoveries.

We often look at our children and want to tell them, "I don't want you to grow up! Stay little", but how I want to wish Ammon into being able to grow up. The seizures have interfered with his brain's ability to grow normally and prolonged seizures can kill the parts of the brain that are working now. Ammon's brain will likely never grow up.

This was enough distressing news for one day and then to end it with Heidi call to tell me that our status for Hague is "pending" was bitter icing on an already nasty day. I know that we and nearly 100 other agencies are at a loss as to why. Nearly as many of us are pending as are approved. This was not expected by anybody but I know that we'll get it all resolved, but certainly not the news I anticipated either.

It appears after contact from the COA today that our accreditation should be coming shortly and they "ran out of time" to get all the agencies finally approved before they posted the list. It would have been nice for agencies to know this before being completely surprised.

Life comes at you fast. I guess I need to buy whatever insurance it is that says they can help.

Happy Birthday Ammon!!

While the calendar says that Ammon just had his 5th birthday on February 15th, we are going to be 4 again this year. We have decided to keep Ammon in his developmental pre-school for one more year. He has made so much progress and we (parents, teachers, and specialists) feel he will have much better kindergarten success if he can have one more year at the pre-school.

Ammon loved the cake, the cars and the car tower and the PINATA. It was his first experience with a pinata and I do think he'll want one next year too.