A Heart of Thanksgiving

Today is the day to share what has been going on in our house lately.

First, hubby is still out of work due to a back injury. It is the 4th week of him being at home. I love my hubby so much it has been hard to see him in pain and not able to work. He loves to work....it is what he does for fun. I honestly think that I have spent more time with him this last month than in the 12 years of marriage. I have enjoyed having him home and the boys have too. But I know that hubby is ready to be back at work. So praying for complete healing for his back. The last month has just about convinced him that he needs a career change.....we will see.

Our youngest son is almost 6 years old. When he was 2 and he began to really speak clearly he started telling us that his heart was "beeping". He would hold his chest, lay in our arms and get pale. His heart would race and beat so hard that it felt like it would just jump out of his little chest. We mentioned these episodes to the pediatrician and they did not have any answers for us. They said that unless he had an episode while we were at the office that they could not help us. Since the episodes only lasted a minute or two and only occurred infrequently we didn't really worry about it. But as he got older we started to notice correlations between certain activities and episodes. For a while he would have them while driving home from church on Sundays. We thought they might be triggered by certain food dyes or sugars so we asked church teachers to not let him have snacks. It seemed to help a little. But throughout the last few years they would just happen, we would sit with him and then they would stop. Fast forward to this last summer. He began having more frequent episodes and they began lasting longer than a few minutes. In July we ended up in the ER because a series of 5 episodes occurred less than 10 minutes apart and each one increased in duration. The last one lasted well over an hour. They were finally get an EKG of what was going on and were able to help the episode stop. That began a journey to the pediatrician, a pediatric cardiologist, a pediatric cardiovascular surgeon and finally a surgery to fix the heart. His diagnosis is SVT (Supraventricular Tachycardia) and we have found that it is quite common. Amazing how something you have never heard of could be common. But as we began talking about it we found many others that have had the same issue. The pediatric cardiologist surgeon recommended an ablation and at first we decided to wait and not rush into anything. Having a 5 year old go under anesthesia is not something we were wanting. So we called the doctor and told him that we were not going to have it done at this time. Our son had not had any episodes since our visit with him almost a month earlier and we were praying for complete healing without surgery. But a couple weeks later while we were all outside working in the yard, we heard a wail and he came to us with tears streaming down his face because he was having another episode. I had not seen such fear on his face before and it broke my heart. The episode lasted quite a while and nothing we did seemed to help. It finally went back into rythym and he calmed down. About an hour later we were talking with him and he told us that he wanted to have the ablation done so his heart would be fixed. When a child asks for something like that all you can do is say YES! So I called and scheduled the abalation. There have been hiccups along the way with insurance companies and hospital deductibles but the Lord used the body of Christ to provide and we were able to get him registered for the surgery last week. He was admitted at 6:00 Monday morning and we said our goodbyes to him at 8:00. The surgery lasted a very long 5 hours. The doctor was able to map the heart, isolate the area that was causing the problem, used freezing energy to destroy that area of tissue and when they tried to trigger the heart to go into SVT again it wouldn't do it. So the surgery was a success. He came out of surgery feeing very yucky but that passed in a few hours and by that night he was sipping water and eating crackers. He slept all night and woke up yesterday bright eyed and ready to go home. His incision sites are healing wonderfully and he has not mentioned any pain at all. We arrived at home yesterday afternoon and he is doing great!!!

So here is my list of praise!

We are so thankful for a successful surgery!
We are thankful for a wonderful doctor that was passionate, gentle of spirit, skilled and very good at communicating with our son and with my hubby & I. We truly felt like our son was his only patient. God had His hand on the whole situation.
We are thankful for the wonderful nurses that our son had while in the hospital. I think he even developed a bit of a crush on the "pretty one" (his words)
We are so thankful for family & friends that have supported us in prayers and financial gifts during this time. We are truly blessed and loved!!
And we give thanks to the One that created our son, knows him inside and out and was with us through this entire time. His peace, provision, and His Presence has made all of the difference!
Thanks be to GOD for His good gifts and for going before us with favor and preparing the way!
Thankful for a quick recovery and complete healing.
I am overwhelmed by the bigness of my God and that He has done so much for us!!!
We are learning so much and I am trusting that the plan and purpose He has had for this great and we will look back and remember how God brought us through and that others will see a testimony of the greatness and love of GOD.

Be blessed!