Hello family and friends,
First of all let me say that Joshua is good. But I feel I must warn you now to grab a tissue. It has been a very emotional weekend for my family. It have been very tearful for the last couple days and I am sure that it will come through in my post.
First I will start with our favorite baby....Joshua. He still remains very feisty which is good but can be a little frustrating at times. He is like a little human roller coaster. I am surely just along for the ride, as are we all, while God lays the tracks. Tonight he was in the 70's low 80's which is VERY good but doesn't help explain why all the drastic sudden changes. They stopped the VEC tonight and so far he is still doing super well. Oxygen is down to 60%, nitric at 20%. He is currently not breathing over the ventilator. His feeds are now at 23....almost where we were when we first came in. They did start the antibiotics again just in case because the fevers are off and on. The cultures are still not growing anything. So I much to be grateful for.
Trevor, Theresa and my parents made it home safely tonight. It was a very hard goodbye for me. Not that I mind being "alone" here but I just hate to say goodbye....I don't even like them for vacations! :) You are never really alone here which is a blessing. Angie and Natalie are here now so I feel like I can go pester her whenever I get lonely and just need to chat. :) I know that she is already starting to feel the boredom, so I think we can certainly get together for a little "shop talk". I must add that little Miss Natalie is an absolute doll!! She is one very happy baby. Please keep her and her family in your prayers as they are having to adjust to being apart again also.
I have much in my life to be thankful for and I am. I know that each of you do also. Please take a minute for me and find something that you are thankful for and thank God for that special gift. I think we can all get lost in the "prayer request" list and forget to tell Him thank you for all that He allows us to have and experience.
This weekend our family was given some pretty devastating news. I am not sure that we have all even began to process it but it is fact and we just need to take a step back and approach this as positively as we can. Our immediate family has all been notified so I now feel that I can share with all of you and ask for your prayers.
As many of you know my dad was a long time employee of Stimpson lumber. They recently closed up shop here in Montana and he was in search of his next big adventure in life. He was planning to go to school for truck driving and him and my mom were getting ready to start writing a new chapter in their book. Well as we know, sometimes the Lord has different plans for us. He told my dad that truck driving was not what he was going to be doing with the rest of his life. Now both my dad and I agreed that God could have been a little more subtle in his telling him, but it is what it is. (And we laughed and said we hope that God lets him know the right choice in his life with as much gusto as He was telling him he made the wrong one.) In his venture to get ready for school he needed to go to the eye doctor to get his vision corrected because he had been having some issues with his eye. (I think his left?) We found out that he has a malignant cancerous tumor in his eye. The reality is that they are planning to remove his eye July first. It appears that because of the pressure on the optical nerve he is not a candidate for chemo. He will be going to appointments tomorrow to run tests on his blood and do some scans to see if there is cancer anywhere else and to see if it spread from his eye to anywhere else or vice versa. I am asking (and will even resort to begging if need be :)) for you to please pray for my dad and his health. Please pray that this cancer is just in his eye. Please pray that they can go in and remove his eye and that he will be healthy and cancer free. Please pray that he can stay in as good of spirits as he is in now as he deals with this life change. Please pray for my mother who is standing right along side him in his fear, pain and wonder. And please thank God for allowing my dad to be in such a place in his life and his faith that he can approach this in such a dignified and positive manner. Many of you know that I am extremely close with my parents (as is my brother) and the emotional pain that we are experiencing, well, I don't know how to explain it but please pray for us as we try to process all of this. I am particularly struggling because I cannot be there for them as they are facing this obstacle and with everything else that is going on I am just feeling very emotionally heavy. I am a firm believer of handing over what I can't deal with to God. And I do this all the time. But even as I hand this over to Him and accept that there is nothing that I can do, the pain is raw and burdening. I know that all of us are feeling the pain. So please keep my entire family in your prayers and ask that we can find comfort in the Lord as we muddle through one more devistating issue in our family.
Blessings to you and your family. Be sure to tell them that you love them.
Leah
(Dad and mom~hope you don't mind me sharing the news. I thought we could all use a little extra prayers the next couple weeks! :) Much love, Your oldest baby)
