In Our Neck of the Woods . . .

life is just continuing on. And it seems to be going faster and faster! I want to get back into blogging again so I thought I would shake things up around here to motivate me to post more often.

Kurt is continuing to get stronger and have more energy. He only naps a few times a week now and he has the desire and the drive to do more things, which is a good sign. He had a check up about a month ago. They did another ct scan to check and see what was happening inside. The bummer part was that we found out that the doctor that we liked is no longer with Mercy. Urgh! So we had to see her partner, who we didn't like as much because he seems to be quicker with us and not take as much time to explain things or talk about things. Also, from the very beginning he hasn't wanted to touch the problem. At least the other doctor was willing to do the surgery if that was what needed to be done. We are just worried that he doesn't want to do the surgery so he may keep waiting instead of going forward with it if that is what was needed. Anyways, the ct scan results came back good. The aneurysm has shrunk, which is a good sign. The inflammation around the damaged area has gone down, which is a good sign. And the hepatic artery (the one that goes to the liver and was completely clogged) actually has a trickle of blood getting through it so his body is trying to heal what it can and adjust to the damage done. All good signs. So we wait and they will rescan him and check again in 3 months. So we will once again, wait and see.

My surgery went really well. I have regained my energy and feel I am actually making progress of getting back on top of everything instead of falling further and further behind. It is a very nice feeling!

In the meanwhile, life has just been continuing on. T learned how to ride a 2 wheeler bike at just 2 years old! It was crazy. He rode all around on his Strider bike and could balance like a madman so we just had to get him to master the art of pedaling. Oh, and then there was teaching him to use the brakes - we are still working on that skill. He LOVES to ride his bike like a big boy and his confidence has grown tremendously.

In our house, when you can ride your bike all the way around the park without stopping or needing any help, you earn yourself your very own "tube" of Oreos. Boy, was this boy proud on that day! Of course, we didn't let him eat the whole thing by himself but he did get to eat quite a few to celebrate his accomplishment.

Awhile ago I was at my parent's house and noticed some pictures I really loved of my mom and dad. I thought about them for weeks, if not months, and finally thought to ask my dad if I could borrow them and scan them into my computer. Of course, he said yes, so now I have them. I have to find a way to print them professionally so I can have them in my house. Here are my favs:

The sad thing is that Trevor looks at these pictures and says "there's papa" and he looks at my mom with a questioning face and says "who's dat?" Makes me sad. He didn't ever know her here on this earth. I am sure he knew her in heaven before he was born but boy, it sure breaks my heart that he looks at her like she is a stranger. =-(

Kurt's doctor hasn't fully released him to full activity and one of the things he still can not do is ride his dirt bike. Honestly, I think it will be awhile before he is allowed back on that toy. His doctor may release him WAAAAY before his wife does.  ;-)

Kurt has been itching to get out and riding so we went for a ride a few weekends ago. He had to ride in the Teryx with T and me. It was beautiful. We went nice and early and it was just perfect. The weather was great, there were hardly any other people there and we could just cruise.

Evan hadn't been on his dirt bike since January so he was a little timid at first but it didn't take him long to remember the feel of the dirt bike. He was definitely wiped out when we got back though. I guess his endurance has suffered from the lack of riding lately.

It was just beautiful! We really enjoyed getting out and exploring a new area.

Updates and a camping trip

Update on Kurt: Today we are 11 weeks out from the first episode and he has been home from the hospital for 8 weeks. Time is a very funny thing lately. We can’t believe it has been that much time since everything happened. He is doing good. No major changes. He still tires easily and doesn’t have his strength back yet. We feel like he should be stronger and have more energy than he does but he is a lot better than when he came home from the hospital so he is improving. The part that concerns us is that he still gets discomfort / pain / pressure in his abdomen / chest periodically, especially if he pushes himself. At first we would panic and worry when this would happen but now we have kind of become use to it and just watch to see if it gets worse. It is just very unsettling always worrying if something is going to happen. He goes in in about 2 weeks for another CT scan and check up to see how things are looking. We are very interested in knowing what is going on in there. I guess in 2 weeks we will know.

Update on me: I have been having my own little health issue. Apparently I didn’t want Kurt to have all the fun! Ha! I was randomly having pains in my lower abdomen. Just a jolt of pain here and there, nothing consistent. It would come and go very suddenly and then I wouldn't feel it for awhile. With everything going on with Kurt, I honestly don’t even know when it started. Was I having them while in the hospital? I have no idea. Before the hospital? I don’t remember. That whole hospital stay really threw me for a loop and I can’t remember but on March 27th the pains were really bothering me. They were happening a lot that day and I remember thinking “just call the doctor and make an appointment before you talk yourself out of it.” I have my annual pap appointment scheduled in May so I thought I would just talk to my doctor about it then but something told me to call right away and so I did. I got in to see my primary the next day on Friday. I told my doctor how the pains start from my left side and shoot out and that they were very sudden and lasted about a second. She ordered an ultrasound which was scheduled for the following Wednesday, April 2nd. Within 2 hours of leaving the ultrasound place, my doctor called me and told me the radiologist called with a preliminary report and they had found a “mass or tumor” on my left ovary. She immediately ordered lab work looking at tumor markers in my blood and a MRI. We were freaked out. Ovarian cancer is related to breast cancer and so we were terrified that this was ovarian cancer. I did the blood work that day but the MRI had to be approved through our insurance company so we had to wait to schedule that. Once it was approved we got the MRI scheduled for Monday, April 7th. I had never had a MRI before and was nervous about being in the tube but it wasn’t too bad. The worst part was that the contrast they gave me made me throw up. Always a pleasant thing when you are strapped to a table! Then we had to wait for my doctor appt which was for Thursday, the 10th. Honestly, for 8 days I was terrified that I had cancer. It was a horrible 8 days. Kurt was freaked out. I was freaked out. My anxiety level shot through the roof! We weren’t going to tell the kids anything until we knew exactly what we were dealing with but they immediately knew something was up. Their radar is set to super sensitive since everything that happened with Kurt and they just knew that something was going on. After they all cornered either myself or Kurt asking if everything was ok, we knew we had to tell them so we told them the truth: the doctors found something, we don’t know what it is but they are doing tests to try to figure it out. They all handled it really well. I guess they have learned to roll with the punches around here. My doctors appointment went good on the 10th. My tumor markers are nice and low in the normal range so they don’t think that it is cancer. It is about 2” round and will need to be removed so I see a surgeon on Thursday of this week to schedule that. I am doing ok. The pains come and go and so does the nausea. The nausea hasn’t been bad, just a little here and there. I am exhausted though. Completely exhausted, which can be caused by this. Between Kurt and me, we are loads of fun lately. One of us is always tired and not up to doing something. See? Loads of fun! So that is where I am at - just waiting to see the surgeon and figure out where we go from here. 

Ok, onto the fun stuff - a camping trip!

Our camping buddies, Marty and Lorraine, had time they had to take off in March so at Kurt's last appointment (at the beginning of March) we asked for permission to take a camping trip. The doctor agreed only if Kurt promised not to do anything. So Marty told Kurt "just drive your truck and trailer down there and I will do all the set up and take down." So off we went to our favorite place, Dillon Beach.

We love the dunes right out the back of the trailer where the kids just play and play and we can see them right from our campsite. Another family camping there had brought sleds so the kids took turns playing with those.

And of course, digging holes.

And burying themselves.

Buddies at the beach.

Little T at the beach. 

This was about 30 seconds before he took off running and fell into a hole that was around a rock and went under water.

Then he spent some time in mommy's sweatshirt warming back up.

Once he was ready to play again, he wore Hailey's sweatshirt since it wasn't as big. Although, it was pink. Oh well.

Kurt even got down and played in the sand.

Evan wanted his picture taken on this rock. 

He was photo bombed!

Kurt said he needed a foot rest. So we did what we had to do.

No children or wives were injured in the making of the foot rest. =-)

I love this picture of T. Too bad he is wearing pink.

On Saturday, our friend Eric came down with his 2 girls to spend the day with us. This was our very creative and very handy table for the little kids. We just pulled their little camping chairs right up to the bench of a picnic table. It worked great!

Kurt is the Uno champion. He will challenge anyone, anytime and he will beat them . . . usually. This night the stars were not aligned for him though and he was beat down by Eric, several times. Poor Kurt. We needed to pay up and all we had to offer were pillow pets. Eric was so excited and gladly accepted his reward. Oh man, we had some good laughs over the pillow pets. Good times! Eric, being a dad, also knew the drama that would follow if said pillow pets went home with a new family so he nicely left them with us.

We have camped at Dillon's for years and always caught rock and dungeness crab but this time we caught a spider crab. This thing just looked creepy. Yikes!

 And we couldn't leave without our annual family photo on the beach. Don't be surprised when this shows up on our Christmas card this year!

Our camping buddies.

Another photo bomb!

Evan loved this stick/log sticking out of the ground. He swung around like a monkey.

Oh man, I love this boy!

Trevor helped Kurt bring up the supports on the trailer.

We did it! We survived our first camping trip post-injury. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of me telling him to go sit down and a lot of him telling me that he could do things but overall, we did good and he would sit down and rest. It was nice to get out of the house and away from everything for a few days.

Just one more - he is just so cute. I love this picture!

So what exactly happened to Kurt anyway?

I will try to explain with the best of my ability exactly what Kurt has going on in there. Dr. Beal would always try to draw us a picture of what she was talking about and it helped to understand but it was hard to draw a 3D image. Kurt is a visual learner so he started looking for an app on his iPad that would help us to see it better. He found a great app called Visual Body. It is really cool. You can manipulate the body, rotate it, hide organs so you can see behind them, etc. We have had a lot of fun playing with it. The doctors also thought it was pretty cool when we showed it to them and they liked playing with it too. So I will be using our nifty-difty app to help explain what happened to Kurt.

Meet our friend. He will be our model today.

So we will zoom in on the abdomen. You can see the heart and the right rib cage. That big organ at the bottom of and behind the rib cage that goes under the heart is the liver. 

I highlighted (in blue) part of the liver. It sees it as different lobes so it doesn't highlight it all together. Anyways, we will hide the liver.

Now the stomach is highlighted. We will hide the stomach.

That little guy highlighted in blue is the pancreas, or Kurt likes to refer it is as his pancake, ha ha! Funny guy! The pancreas is a very sensitive organ that doesn't like to be moved or touched. It is one organ they are worried about moving because it really doesn't like to be messed with. We will hide it too.

So now that we have moved those organs out of the way, we zoomed in and you can see back to the aorta. It is the blue highlighted thing in the back. This is the main artery that runs down the center of the body and delivers blood to the body.

That spot in the center that is highlighted is the celiac artery. It branches off the front of the aorta (towards your belly). It is a very short artery and it immediately branches 3 ways.

One branch goes to the liver, called the hepatic artery.

Another branch goes to the spleen, called the splenic artery.

And the 3rd branch goes to the stomach. 

(The doctors said this artery isn't to scale and should be bigger).

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Here is a side view of the aorta. The front of the body is to the left and the back/spine is to the right.

And the celiac, highlighted blue, in the middle.

As you can see, it isn't the easiest place to work on. You have to move the organs out of the way and then you still have all sorts of other arteries and veins to worry about damaging.

Kurt's tear started right where the celiac artery comes off of the aortic artery and tore down into the "intersection" of where all the branches are. The aneurysm is sitting right on that intersection. The original problem was that they couldn't just put a stint in because it went into the branched area and there wasn't a 3-way branch stint. They said that the stomach and the spleen have several blood sources so they weren't too worried about those but they didn't want to compromise the blood flow to the liver. After his 2 big pain attacks, they decided to put a stint in that would only go towards the liver to keep the blood flow going that direction. They would be cutting off the blood flow to the stomach and the spleen by doing this but, again, those organs have many sources of blood so they weren't too worried about them.

When they did the 2 angiograms, they were trying to get that stint put in there. Unfortunately, they were not able to do it. What they think happened was that when he had those 2 huge attacks of pain, the tear continued down the hepatic artery (toward the liver) and the blood clot moved down into the that artery, completely blocking off the blood flow to the liver, exactly what they didn't want to have happen. His liver took a hit and they watched it very closely by drawing labs frequently. Every day his liver numbers improved. His liver recovered quickly and his labs all now show normal liver function.

The original surgery plan was to go in, move the organs (very carefully) out of the way and then clamp down on the aortic artery above the celiac, completely stopping blood flow to the lower portion of his body. They said the organs can handle that for about an hour before they start having problems from lack of blood. Of course, there is always the risk that the organs may have problems anyways just from having their blood flow stopped. Then they would tie off the celiac artery so no blood flow could enter it. They would also have to tie off the splenic artery (the one that goes to the spleen) and the artery that goes to the stomach so that blood wouldn't back flow into the celiac through those sources. This would completely block off the celiac and therefore, remove any risk of the aneurysm from rupturing. You can see why they are hesitant to do this surgery. It is very invasive and the risks are great to his organs. 

The second surgery idea they came up with was a little less invasive. They would reenter his artery through the leg (like the angiogram) and travel up the aorta to the celiac location. They would then block off the entrance to the celiac with a mesh like material so blood couldn't flow into it. They would still have to open up his abdomen and move the organs because they would still need to tie off the arteries to the spleen and stomach to prevent back flow. At least with this option, they are not clamping down on the aorta and stopping the blood. It still carries the risks of moving the organs and messing around deep in the abdomen.

Hopefully that makes sense. They are still just watching him. He had an appointment on Friday with his vascular surgeon and she said that usually any problems occur within the first 2-3 weeks, which is what happened with those attacks. She said once you get out of those first few weeks, things tend to settle down and remain calm. We are now almost 5 weeks out so he should remain stable and have no further complications, fingers crossed. They will rescan him in 2 months and we will see what is going on in there. Until then, he is still on restriction for what he can do which means that I am playing Mrs. Dad (like Mr. Mom) around here; hauling beds, mowing the grass, etc. And most importantly, keeping Kurt from doing anything. I think that is going to be the hardest part yet.