Latex Gloves, a Cerebellum, and Royalty (all in one day)

What you learn while waiting your turn at St. Paul Children's hospital:


1. Miss Minnesota is a very pretty volunteer. And she's nice. I'm pretty sure you have to be nice to be Miss Minnesota. I almost snatched the tiara right off her noggin, but I restrained myself.

2.You can wait over an hour past your appointment time and still live. Even if you're with a one-year-old during his regularly scheduled nap time.


3. Latex gloves make excellent balloons (if you carefully seal the opening around your mouth and blow REALLY hard.) These balloons can entertain your one-year-old for seconds or even minutes. Because you can blow them off your face dramatically, letting them fly across the room, smacking your husband in the groin. Fun for everyone.

4. If you want your child's name to finally be called, just go to the bathroom and take your sweet time, washing your hands while singing the abc's and thinking about all the gazillions of germs you've encountered. They'll call your child's name while you're in there. Works every time.

Okay, now for the update. For those of you who are new here (and I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of you) Asher has hydrocephalus, a condition where the spinal fluid in the brain is not flowing through the ventricles and getting out, so it's pooling basically. That's my really lame definition, anyway.

We met with the neurosurgeon yesterday and looked over the MRI. He explained that the fluid in the ventricles is now basically pushing Asher's cerebellum (at the back base of the brain) down. This is called the Chiari malfunction. Obviously that's not good, but will most likely correct itself after the shunt is put in. The other more pressing issue (pun intended) is that the two biggest ventricles that are the most full have some fluid seeping out of them since they're so big. That fluid is going into the brain tissue. This isn't life threatening, but it's a good idea to make it stop. It's happening very slowly, but it's part of the reason Asher needs to have a shunt put in soonly.

Asher's large neurosurgeon (I say "large" because he is a very BIG man-Ryan keeps joking about how hard it must be to do brain surgery with sausage fingers, but I digress)...wait, what was I saying? Oh, the large neurosurgeon says that he would have liked to have done the surgery next week, but Asher is sick and on antibiotics so we need to let that clear up before he can go into surgery. So his surgery will be the week after Thanksgiving. We're supposed to get a call with date and time today.

Now if you're a praying person, here is something specific for you. I believe God loves Asher a whole lot and knows how to time this thing. We just need a healthy baby so we can get in there and get this surgery done, relieving the cerebellum and such. So, NO MORE COLDS!

There you have it!

Seeing an MRI of Asher's brain, the problems therein, and having a neurosurgeon point out exactly where he'll be working on that brain is disturbing. But we can do nothing now but believe that this will all happen smoothly. It is when we have no control that we experience the most peace, knowing it isn't up to us and believing that it's up to Someone much more powerful than we are. We're thankful for that peace.