New Year!

Happy New Year! We had a great holiday and visit to Ohio, and are hopefully in store for some good things in 2009! Just a quick update - we saw ENT today and he decided that Lucas' tonsils and adenoids need to come out right away. To use his exact words, "the size of his tonsils are quite impressive." Why is it that the only big thing on Lucas is something that obstructs his breathing?! While we don't want another surgery for him or for him to hurt afterwards, its a bit of relief to just get this taken care of. We had Lucas sleeping in our room while visiting my family and it was disturbing how much Lucas struggles to breathe while he sleeps. He's not only snoring really badly, but I can hear him actually stop breathing for a few seconds, then pull in a big breath. He stirs constanatly. And, he has another ear infection! Ugh. I was suspicious that he was getting one because he was tugging at his ears again and sure enough, it was confirmed today. The ENT said his adenoids are most likely causing the repetitve infections every time he gets a cold, which is why these will come out too.

They determined through a test that he has fluid behind the ear drum. He wants to put a hole in the eardrum during the surgery to drain the fluid and will also put tubes in. He gave us the choice for tubes because there is a 30% chance that he won't need them after taking the adenoids out... but with with the odds greater that he will need them, we are opting to have it done to avoid another surgery later. Relieving this fluid will be a good thing, I am curious if it is currently impacting his balance and struggle to sit up independently. The doctor said it can definitely throw off balance.

We also did a hearing test while we were there, the test showed "moderate" hearing loss but I don't believe it at all. We know he hears well, especially with compromised vision, he listens intently to everything! This test was different than the neurological hearing assessment they did when he was in the NICU, I imagine this is how they do it in schools, I can't remember. We sat in a room while she sent different sounds through speakers on each side, they were looking for him to turn to the sound each time. I'm like... ummmm, he has vision issues and can only see a couple of feet in front of him, he's not accustomed to "look" for sounds because he hasn't quite connected all of that... but he absolutely hears them! He turned a few times, but mostly chattered through it. He'd rather listen to his own babbling these days! A couple of times when the woman said his name over the speaker, she'd stop and listen, but then he'd look up at me as if I said it. After all, it was is only him and I in a padded room with speakers, he's no dummy! Kind of a waste of time, and the ENT agreed that it didn't mean much at this age. He did feel, however, that the fluid build up behind the eardrum may be keeping him from hearing to his full capacity. I'll agree with that, but I don't buy for a minute that he has moderate loss. The surgery will be sometime in January, just waiting to hear from the scheduler. This should also allow us to officially get rid of the oxygen tanks, that will be a good day!

Now that the holidays are behind us, I'm hoping I can update again more frequently. I should have the comparison pictures of his CT scans up shortly. I haven't pulled the pictures off the camera from Christmas yet, but here's some cute ones from our little "photo session" that I did for our holiday card a couple weeks ago (if you look closely in the 6th picture down, you can finally see his front buckers)...

And here's where I lost him...