the long awaited....

appointment... ya know, i think it went well. we really liked dr. fahl. he's very attentive and took at least an hour with us. he got a full history from us of grayson, back to even when he was in the womb! after looking at him, labs, hearing our story, his gut feeling is that he does not have an eosinophilic disorder. i know, awesome, right? but i have to tell you, its going to be awfully hard for me to celebrate until after the tests are done. he does want to pursue testing for this because of all of his allergies and previous test results, so we will start with a biopsy of his stomach lining, hopefully on thursday, but it might be a couple weeks from now, depending on his schedule. he is puzzled by all of the positive food tests, but on the other hand, he really doesn't trust the RAST testing that they have done. he said there are only a few labs that do the testing well, none of them are here. i'm not sure what that means, except that he said it is possible to get false positives. i said "thirty false positives?" he said "yes". so, there's that. he was quite intrigued by the fact that my uncle was allergic to just about all foods when he was a kid, and i need to call him and get all that he remembers out of him. uncle mike, if you're reading this, call me if i don't call you first. :) anyway, the biopsy. basically, they take my sweet angel boy, sedate him with gas, i believe, and then stick something down his throat and take 3 to 4 pieces of his stomach lining. its done in an operating room with an anesthesist standing by, and then he will be in recovery until he wakes up and is ok. its outpatient, so its same day. it makes me awfully nervous, as it would any mother, but it has to be done, so that we can move on. after he gets the results, if they are favorable, then we start trialing foods. we'll start with rice for a week. if we don't notice any change in anything (poop, gas, spit up, eczema, behavior), then we trial the next food the next week. he wants me to make a list of all of the things i want to be able to feed him. it was nice of him to put it that way. "the things you'd like to feed him". i don't know why, it just felt encouraging to hear i guess. anyway, we'll do this for 6 weeks, with 6 new foods hopefully, and at the end of the 6 weeks, he'll get another biopsy to see if the eosinophil levels have changed at all. that will be a big determining factor to see if he has a problem. so that's about it in a nutshell. neither kenny nor i ate all day long until after the appointment, me- because i was nervous, kenny- because he couldn't find any food. :) so we were pretty excited to go eat the elaborate feast that sweet alyssa and ian had cooking for us! it was LOVELY to at least do something special on this, his real birthday. kenny gets so frustrated with me because i'm so attached to the actual DAY the holiday falls on. we technically celebrated his birthday yesterday when the party was, but TODAY is the actual birthday so i wanted to do something fun. well, really i wanted kenny to take the day off work, to which he promptly rolled his eyes. so thanks ian and lyss for makin' it special. (OH and for bathing our daughter and delivering her to our front door fed, clean and in jammies!!!!! how bout that for the end of the day!) thank you all so much for praying for us today. i really do feel more at peace today. i know that we have to be ok with either of the results. alyssa reminded me today that God does not call the equipped. He equips those whom He calls. isn't that great? because right now, i do not feel equipped to deal with anything like this. which brings up another thing. my new friend jen and her husband scott and son carter all came to grayson's party yesterday. carter is the sweet little boy who has an eosinophilic disorder who i've talked about in a previous post. he is four and absolutely the cutest little thing. jen is such an inspiration to me. she has done so much research for this little boy and she makes every day so special for him! carter and graysoLOVED the hypoallergenic grape kool aid snowcones at the party (jen's idea) and he was just so happy about life! i just wanted to hug the little munchkin. anyway, back to my point. jen, i don't know how you do it! God has given you so much grace and its so encouraging to hear you talk about the recipes for fudge you have come up with using only like 2 ingredients! its absolutely amazing! thank you for giving me courage. i'm just in awe of how you have handled all that has been thrown to you. your family is a blessing to ours. :)

thank you again for the prayers. :) i will keep the blog updated if we get to do the biopsy this week.