the BIG update!

Ok all, sorry for the mass email but due to the current events it’s easiest for me to do it this way right now, I hope no one’s offended.

My Dad: As most of you know, on the night of my Dad’s birthday (Wednesday, October 5, 2005) my brother and I had to call 911 and get my Dad to the hospital after we noticed he was unresponsive to anything we said or did (as in he was awake, but not recognizing us or anything), and had a seizure right in front of us.. From the local hospital he was flown via helicopter to a better hospital in the Twin Cities. Since then he’s been on life support (a respirator, IV fluids, and most recently a feeding tube). He was on sedatives for a while due to him being highly agitated and trying to take the tubes out etc. He’s currently off the sedation now, his blood pressure was down (it was near 240/120+ for quite a while), and he can occasionally go off of the respirator for a short period. He’s had an MRI, EEG, CT, and numerous other tests... the MRI showed a definite decrease in brain function, due to a lack of oxygen. So now coupled wit his previously known kidney disease, we found out yesterday that he also has a liver disease, and something called “encephalopathy”, which the Dr briefly described as a sort of dementia. I just got done looking it up online, and it appear that my Dad has all the possible factors for causing it (kidney & liver disease, drinking alcohol) and from the sites I looked at, it looks like this is it…. The Dr’s recommend waiting another week to see how he will do off the ventilator, so in a few days we should know more about actually how mentally aware he is… but a week from now, either way it will be decision time and my father had made it clear to us he didn’t want to ever have to be on life support (he told us his wishes long before this happened).

With all this going on, I have to figure out what I'm going to do for a living situation since no matter what the outcome of my Dad, he won’t be coming home to our house and I can’t afford it on my own. The whole reason I’ve been living at my dad’s for so long is because I haven’t been able to afford to live in ANY of the places advertised around here, unless I got one or two more jobs which I just plain can’t handle anymore (mentally/emotionally and physically). I'm not gonna ramble on about that right now, it’s too hard to think about at the moment…

And the other big news…. IT”S A BOY!!! And boy is it ever a boy!! No mistaking what’s there and what’s not from the ultrasound! I’ll try to get the few pics I have scanned so others can see, but I don’t think they’ll scan well. Now, time to put aside all the girly stuff I stupidly bought (see what I get for getting my hopes up too high?) and look for some unusual but not too freaky boy names :) mebbe something Irish sinc he'll be born near St Patrick's Day...

That’s all I have for now… I hope everyone else is doing much better than me!
~Ama