Processing

It's been a couple days since we got our latest batch of news. My mind has been going pretty much non-stop since then. On Thursday afternoon at our allergist appointment, the doctor made a statement about Noah's new bilateral ear infections that really rattled me. He said, "Well, in my opinion, it is not worth the risk of leaving an ear infection untreated in an immunosuppressed child." That word stopped me cold. It had not really sunk in until then that this is our new reality.  I've always thought of children who are immunosuppressed as having cancer, been extremely premature or having had a transplant or something MAJOR like that! It had never occurred to me that it could happen to my child. Although we have already been living with this condition for months now, it just felt a lot more real and scary to have a name.

Needless to say, many things have been swirling through my head. How are we going to keep him healthy? How do we make sure he's not exposed to strep? How do we keep him infection-free without daily antibiotics which only create all kinds of other problems for him. One of the conclusions three doctors have now come to is that all the GI issues (primarily a recurrent candida infection) Noah's been having is because of the antibiotics he's been on. This is actually an issue I am still not 100% convinced is only related to antibiotic use.  There are several other things that could be factors that need to be explored. Good thing I'm not afraid to ask questions and follow my gut (no pun intended)!

One of the many things that has been very comforting to me over the past few days is that, looking back at Caleb as a young toddler, he struggled with chronic infections as well. I believe he is one of the kids that, according to the immunologist, slipped through the cracks and was never diagnosed.  I haven't found out for sure yet if there's a way to actually test to see if he had and IgG deficiency as some point or not but it sure would be interesting to know.  There are, though, some major differences between the two that make things a little worse for Noah. Caleb would get sick about every 4-5 weeks whereas Noah has not gone more than 13 days in the past 9 months without getting sick. The immunologist was careful to point out that this is NOT a normal pattern of illness in a child and should not be happening. In a weird sort of way, it's a relief to know that I'm not crazy and we're not doing anything wrong: our child should NOT be sick this often.

We are choosing now to focus on the fact that we have HOPE. There is HOPE that Noah's immune system is simply getting off to a slow start and that in a couple years he will be fine. There is HOPE that the vaccination he got on Thursday will protect his little body from a deadly infection.  And, the most important HOPE of all is that we have a Savior who loves our little boy more than we can imagine and already has this all figured out.