Miracles in the Rough

Well, this past week has probably been the most difficult one we've had to face so far as a family.  As always, God's grace has proved sufficient to get us through.  We have been amazed at the countless miracles we have witnessed God perform in and through this whole ordeal.

Two weeks ago, Tim had injured himself dragging out our dead lawn tractor which had 2 flat tires from the shed.  He had been nursing the injury which had started to improve, but then a few days later, he started having increased pain in the area.  Of course, being the nurse that I am, I instantly checked him out for appendicitis since the area is in the right lower quadrant.  He passed all of the tests for that, so I told him he probably did something that re-injured his tendon.  On Friday night, we felt a pop playing a game at the boys Taekwondo lesson.  That brought us up to the past weekend where Tim started feeling really sick and spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed.  He thought perhaps he had a virus.  On Monday, he was feeling much better and went to work.  By the evening, he was feeling poorly again and was complaining of severe back pain and wanted me to put Deep Blue essential oil blend on his back.  When I touched his back, I recognized instantly that he was feverish.  I immediately thought of his injury and told him to roll over so I could check the area.  I found a large mass in his lower right quadrant that was even hotter than the rest of his body.  I knew things weren't good, but I was thinking he had caused a hernia and perhaps some of his bowel had become obstructed.

He wanted me to go to work and promised he would call the doctor first thing in the morning.  I told him there was a chance the doctor would send him to the ER.  He said he'd be fine.  Sure enough, he was sent to the ER.  The Lord orchestrated the events giving Tim a Christian physician to care for him.  The doctor was assuming it was an abdominal wall hernia and ordered a CT Scan.  When he came in to give Tim the results, it was quite a shock for Tim to hear the diagnosis was Ruptured Appendix.  The doctor prayed with Tim at that point, which was such a blessing to him.  Tim called me right away, and I was able to get my clinical manager to cover me at work so that I could go to be with him.

The biggest miracle in all of this is that Tim is alive and that he is doing as well as he is.  Every doctor who has been in to see him has remarked that he is doing better than most people in his situation.  We think the appendix ruptured Friday night when Tim felt that pop, so he went several days with a ruptured appendix before receiving medical help.  Thankfully, once we thought he had a virus, we were using essential oils to support his immune system.  Tim's body perfectly encapsulated the toxic waste from his intestines in a multi-compartmental abscess that preserved him from going into sepsis or from death.  The doctors put him on IV antibiotics, and the next day they placed a drain to get the infection and toxins out of the abscess.  Tim will have the drain in for the next few weeks until the abscess is fully drained or until he can have surgery to remove his appendix.  He will need weekly checks of the drain and follow-up CT Scans.  Before the surgery, he will also need a colonoscopy.

Our family has done a lot with essential oils and natural supplements over the last two years to support our bodies and help our bodies function at its optimal function.  In addition, Tim did a gentle, natural cleanse in January to clean up his gut and help it be extremely healthy.  Then in March, our family began a cellular healing diet that has really helped our gut to be healthy and helped our bodies detox so that we can be as healthy as possible.  All of these events has allowed Tim's body to be able to function at its highest level helping to preserve his life and keep him from being as sick as he could have been.  We praise God for the perfect timing of all of these events and for the amazing design He has created the human body with to naturally be able to heal and protect itself.

Once the drain was inserted with radiographic imaging while Tim was sedated, Tim got worse with the fever, infection, and pain.  We were warned he would get sicker before he got better, but we never expected the pain to be so terribly extreme.  The last several days have been very difficult, discouraging, and exhausting.  The extra energy I have from being on our diet has tremendously helped me as I stayed overnight caring for Tim at his worst and continued the rest of the week pulling late nights with going to bed after midnight and getting up at 6 and spending most of my awake hours with Tim and orchestrating child care.  Through it all, God has been our strength and calm and our every present fortress.

It would take a long time of telling you all of the "mini" miracles we have witnessed this week between Tim's medical care, health, the ways things worked out with the boys' needs, how God intervened when I had to be in two places at the same time and needed something else from home, and how God brought so many people to our rescue to help us in so many countless ways.

One last miracle I have to share is the fact that through this very difficult week that has been hard on all of us, especially the boys who have spent evenings visiting Daddy in the hospital and hardly having Mommy to care for them, Josh has done extremely well.  With his Autism, Bi-polar, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, something as huge as this whole event has been should have landed him back in a psychiatric hospital.  The last 2 years, he has been able to wean off of 9 of the 10 drugs he took daily because of his increased function through natural solutions, and his final drug is on schedule to be completed by the middle of June.  Josh took this whole ordeal in stride and even had a few perfect days at school despite the drama going on.  In fact, his behavior overall was better than David's.

All of us are emotionally raw and ready for our normal family routine.  Tim was discharged from the hospital on Saturday evening.  He is still recovering but slowly.  He has a long road ahead of him as the toxins continue to drain out of his abdominal cavity, and he anticipates abdominal surgery in about 6 weeks or so.  Through it all, we have confidence that God has all of this under his sovereign control.  He holds us closely in His capable hands drawing us near to His heart.  We are so thankful that we don't have to go through this alone.  We are also grateful for the many family and friends who have come to our aide no matter what our needs have been through this whole ordeal.  God is so good!

Autism Awareness Month 2016

As Autism Awareness Month comes to an end, I am finally having a moment to write my yearly Autism Awareness post. 

In the Autism world, it is so easy to be consumed by hoplessness.  It's an overwhelming diagnosis with life-long implications.  As the years ticked by after Josh's Autism diagnosis at 4 years of age, things only looked gloomier and more hopeless as more and more diagnoses were tagged on and more problems ensued.  By his second psychiatric hospitalization at 8 years of age and the warning by the doctor that it most certainly would not be his last hospitalization and things would get really rough once puberty hit requiring constant medication dosing adjustments to compensate for fluctuating hormone production, we were left with worries about the future and realization that we would need to start planning for his adulthood and his needing care and supervision for the rest of his life.  I stopped dreaming that someday he would be able to get married recognizing that it was just too impossible.

Fast forward 3 years, and our hopes for the future have drastically changed.  Instead of doom and gloom and the impossibility of independence as an adult, we see a bright future, and I have begun praying that God would raise up a godly spouse for him one day.

What has changed? EVERYTHING!  This metamorphosis began when we started using essential oils over 2 years ago then incorporated natural supplements all while getting rid of typical personal care and household products that are toxic switching to natural stuff I make with natural ingredients to keep us safe and healthy.  Then began a greater scrutiny about the food we used and the process of eliminating processed stuff and switching to more organic choices.

With each change we made in our daily habits and choices, we saw more and more changes for the better.  The two-year transformation began with instability and a threat of a third hospitalization due to the 10 drugs a day he was currently taking not enough to keep him stable.  Fast forward two years, and Josh is only taking 1 drug a day that he has been slowly weaning off of over the past 2 years and will be fully weaned off of by the middle of June according to his doctor's wean plan.  With each drug he weaned off of, he became happier, more compliant, and more stable.  We have been discovering more and more aspects to his personality that had been locked inside him unknown to us.

The medical world has things all backwards when it comes to Autism.  They treat symptoms with drugs that often make the person have a flat affect and zero personality.  While some behavior therapy recommendations are made and can be effective in helping a child cope in our world, progress is painfully slow.  What is often overlooked and neglected is the availability and success of natural things and diet.  God created all things for our benefit and good, and mankind has done a lot to taint it or ruin it altogether.  We need to get back to the way God created things!

This year, I began a new learning journey into the world of healthy diets and was blown away by what studies are out there regarding the implications of a leaky gut and the benefits of cutting out inflammatory foods from the diet.  While this information is helpful to every human who wants to be healthy, it has HUGE implications for people with Autism.  After reading the literature available, I decided to take the plunge and eliminate gluten from Josh's diet (I had already eliminated artificial dyes and flavors a year prior to that).  Surprisingly, he went from a jittery, fidgety, easily irritated kid to a calm and collected child who hardly gets irritated.  After letting him have gluten for one meal around the Easter holiday and having a difficult next 1.5 days of increased irritability and hyperactivity, he reset and went back to his new norm.  That was enough to convince us of the importance to avoid gluten for good.

In March, we embarked on a journey as a family beginning the Cellular Healing Diet by Dr. Pompa.  It is a pretty involved diet that heals the leaky gut, helps the body rid itself of toxins, decreases inflammation, and improves cellular health.  We believe this is the final key for helping Josh fully recover of his Autism and other issues.  From the changes we have already seen since starting the diet, we are getting more and more confident of the end results.

There is hope!  Don't ever let anyone or any doctor convince you otherwise.  Never give up fighting!  Don't accept a doom and gloom prognosis.  There is always room to improve and excel.  Don't discount God's power to do the impossible!  Josh's prognosis seemed dismal and improvement seemed so impossible, but God is greater and more powerful!  He has directed us to the right people and the right resources, and with the change to natural solutions and healthy diet, Josh is on the road to full recovery!  God is amazing!

Psalm 147:11 - "but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love."

Celebrating Success

If you are a special needs family, you understand the difficulty of doing special things in the community as an entire family.  This is a struggle we had dealt with since our boys were a toddler and baby.

Due to his Autism, Josh struggles with sensory overload and anxiety over new places and new routines.  As a result, being in a new and public environment doesn't work so well for him.  Our attempts to have him in this kind of environment usually end up in an embarrassing meltdown and humiliating drama.  As a result, we typically don't bring Josh into community settings, and it's not for the lack of trying.  Every so often, we build up the courage to give it a shot only to be discouraged and disappointed when it didn't go so well.

We got convicted about preventing David from experiencing community outings because of his brother, so we started doing family events with just the 3 of us leaving Josh with a home health aide to care for his needs.  Even though, Josh never really seemed bothered by it or left out, we always felt so guilty having fun without him and feeling his absence deeply.

Since Josh has been doing so much better as a result of our wellness journey and use of essential oils, we decided to test the limit.  We had been doing a few small-scale outings with the assistance of a home health aide and having an easier time of it, but the outings were not huge events.  We decided to press the limits this past Friday and have a family dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Philadelphia then attend a String Quartet concert at the Kimmel Center.  The concert started at 8:00 p.m., which is Josh's bed-time, and usually, he doesn't do well if we mess with that, so this test was huge in many respects.

I am so excited to announce that the evening was a HUGE success!  Josh didn't have any meltdowns.  We had a close call in the middle of the second musical piece when we prevented Josh from lying on the floor during the concert, but he was able to use his coping skills and pull himself together without creating a huge scene.  He loved the outing and has remarked several times how much fun he had and that he wants to do something like that again!  It's great for his confidence to know that he can have a successful outing also.  A second test was the next day because of the extremely late night.  We got home shortly after 11:00 p.m. Friday night (of course, Josh slept the whole way home).  When Josh doesn't go to bed at 8:00 p.m., his behavior is usually terrible the next day.  However, on Saturday, he had a great day despite the many chores (another angst)!

We are praising the Lord for His work in Josh's life and giving our family the chance to be whole and enjoy quality and memorable time together doing special things in the community!  We pray that we will have many more happy and memorable outings.

Waiting for the concert to begin