I thought I should update our blog before it hits the 2 month mark since our last post... sorry!!
Winter has never bothered me much before this winter. I actually look forward to each season. However, the germs of winter this year are killing me! This year has actually been one of our healthiest- for Joshua and Luke that is. Whatever luck we have experienced with Joshua and Luke has been counteracted by Matthew. Remember the little cold Matthew was getting over about 2 months ago??? He's still getting over it! Matthew's pediatrician treated him for a chronic ear infection as a result of this cold with 4 rounds of antibiotics. Matthew has had a fever for over a month and has been extra sleepy. We were told Matthew may have developed luekemia which is a common cancer seen amoung transplant recipients because of the steriods they have to take to avoid rejection. We went to see an infectious disease doctor and he told me to take a huge sigh of relief because Matthew did not have luekemia, however; he suspected Matthew was in rejection. I MUST be insance because I immediately felt a lot of relief. What is wrong with me??? We ended up in cardiology doing lots of bloodwork and an echo, but everything looked good there. Echo's are not completely reliable in ruling out rejection, but cardiology wanted to explore every option before rushing in to do a heart biopspy when everything else looked good. More relief. Last week we spent 4 out of 5 days at the hospital or in doctor's offices. This week we got a CT scan of Matthew's head and discovered that he has severe sinusitis and horrible ear infections. I'll take it over leukemia or rejection! Matthew's transplant cardiologist told us that she really wanted to get on top of this because sinus infection can enter children's brain in immune suppressed patients- so we have an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat doctor tommorrow. Why not?? We haven't seen an ENT specialist with Matthew yet. They are planning to scope him to see what kind of infection he has so we can treat it approriately because obviously it hasn't gone away given the 40 plus days of antibiotics he's already been on. Matthew will probably get tubes in his ears as well.

So, in a nutshell, this is how my last two months have been spent. I really want to get all of this resolved because any time Matthew has sickness that imitates the signs of rejection I always worry that he could be in rejection, but his sickness masks it. That's what happened a year ago when Matthew was sick and his sickness was covering up the fact that he was actually in heart failure needing to be put on the transplant list. Tommorrow we will get more answers and hopefully a gameplan to get Matthew better.

I think my new best friend is Punxsutawney Phil- the groundhog who did not see his shadow yesterday therefore, predicting an early Spring. :) Let's all pray he's right!