A Crazy Week and Crazier Day

It was a busy week.
On Tuesday, we celebrated Mango's 8th birthday. We always go out to eat at a restaurant of the birthday child's choice, and Mango chose Space Aliens - a space themed restaurant. The kids all got a few free game tokens, and Seely was even kind enough to give his to the birthday girl! She was given this "lovely" headband to wear and a free birthday sundae.

On Wednesday morning, I was the guest speaker for the group of Japanese students. I spoke about one of my great passions - adoption. Adoption is extremly uncommon in Japan, so they are always very good listeners; and for the second time in a row, I have made a good number of these young people cry simply by sharing our stories and travel videos. It's truly a privilege to be able to talk with them, and to see their hearts so moved.

On Saturday, we headed off to the Mall of America with Sae for some shopping and sight-seeing. And even though it's expensive, we always love to eat at the RainForest Cafe (which Monkey affectionately calls "The Monkey Restaurant" because of the robotic monkeys singing and swinging in the trees).

Yesterday, the girls had their family birthday party with their cousin. The three girls have birthdays within about 2 1/2 weeks of each other, so we have a party together every year. This year, I actually missed their party, because Monkey is having some pretty major asthma trouble and needed to take a trip to urgent care.

And the biggest excitement of this past week is not neccessarily a good one. Lily took off her prosthetic ear on Saturday night, and her post area was grossly infected and draining all sorts of really not lovely "stuff". We cleaned it up (I'll spare you the details), put on her strong, prescription antibiotic ointment, and sent her off to bed. By Sunday morning, the area was not at all improved, and was so red and swollen that the skin had started to cover over her top ear post. We immediately placed a call to her surgeon, who ordered more antibiotics, and we are to see them Tuesday morning for an evaluation. If the skin that's currently over the post does not recede, she will need surgery to re-expose the top post before she will be able to wear her prosthetic again. The surgeon's best guess is a 50/50 chance of needing further surgery or not. Please pray that this will clear up without it.

As this is on the side of her head, we've started taking pictures of what we are seeing, so Lily can actually get a look at it herself, rather than just listen to us talk about it. This picture was taken just this morning. Much of the redness and swelling is gone, but the posts are still draining quite a bit. The bottom post is what the posts are supposed to look like coming through her skin; you can see the top one is covered about half way with skin.

People ask us if it hurts her, but Lily really does not complain very much about it. I think after having several surgeries in the area, that most of the nerves are gone or damaged and she just really feels very little there. They have also found that children who experienced a lot of early neglect simply do not feel and process pain like the rest of us do...and she has an extremely high pain tolerance....which leads us to the next problem. We had her well-check visit this morning with our pediatrician (God bless him, he never freaks out over her ear post infections which are rare enough that most docs never even see one!), and discover that she has an ear infection in her hearing ear. She had told me there was some "popping" in that ear over the weekend, but said there was no pain/discomfort. I had told her to let me know right away if it hurt at all, and I'd get her in to a doctor, and she never said that it hurt. Whether she really didn't feel pain, or whether it just didn't "connect" in her brain, I don't really know. Anyways, her antibiotic was changed to one that will cover both skin and ear infections, and her ENT surgeon will take a look at that too tomorrow when we are there.

We'd certainly appreciate any and all prayers that she will heal up on her own (with God's help, of course) and without any further surgery. We'll keep you posted.