When life gives you lemons....

Make Lemonade!    

Ok, yes I know its a cheesy saying but that how I've felt the last month. The last 3 weeks have gone by in such a blur. We have been so busy between appointments, Nick and I getting sick and starting a new meal and workout plan. So here goes,

The first week of January consisted of multiple appointments for just about everyone, except for Marley the dog. Nick and I both had orthopedic doctor appointments. Nick's was for his elbow that had been bothering him for many weeks and min was for the ever present carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrists. We figured that Nick would be getting a cortisone shot in his elbow, but what was up in the air was how they were going to fix mine. We were correct and Nick did get a cortisone shot in his elbow and so far that has made the pain better. My appointment went like this.... I got shots about 7 or 8 years ago and they lasted me this long. I could get the shots again or do surgery. Shots had the least amount of recovery time and cost less. If I did the surgery he couldn't do both wrists at the same time so I was looking at being off of work for about 6-8 weeks. Not something I could afford to do at this time, so..... cortisone shots it was... so far they have worked great. I'm not dropping things and I can actually grip things. Then the next Tuesday night Nick was complaining about his knee and I made him go to the walk in clinic. Well, that turned into another Orthopedic doctor visit the next day. This one may be a little more tricky. The current theory is that he has a meniscus tear. They gave him a cortisone shot, but if it doesn't get better in the next week he may need to have surgery. That is not something that he's looking forward to at all. We are hoping the cortisone works, but surgery is in the back of our minds.

Colton had another ear infection. (If you are counting, this is #2). He has finished his antibiotics for that and seems to be doing well. On the 6th, we had another scan of his head for the cranial remodeling helmet. We were pleasantly surprised that he no longer has to wear the helmet!  So happy!  He will have a final scan of his head on February 3rd just to make sure that nothing has moved and we are still in good shape, haha. Then on the 7th we went to Indianapolis for Vent Clinic. Colton had such an air leak around his trash that we were getting alarms on the vent saying that the air it was putting in wasn't coming back out. So Colton got a new trach! We didn't put it in until Monday evening and then noticed that the air that was going in was way too much! We had to decrease his vent settings even further. He is on such low settings that if he were in the hospital we would try to take the ventilator away, unfortunately Colton does not like to breath on his own so for now we are stuck on very low settings. We don't have to go back to vent clinic for 3 months!

On the 14th we had our neurology appointment and she says everything looks great. She thinks Colton is progressing wonderfully. She did pull up his MRI for us to look at and she says that she thinks he has moderate Lissencephaly. She also said that doesn't have any bearing on how he's going to do in the future. She has seen kids that have a worse looking MRI that do a lot and then she's seen kids that have a better looking MRI that do a lot less than Colton does. Best part of the appointment? We don't have to go back for a year!  Yeah for cutting down on the appointments and travel!

As I mentioned above, Nick and I have both been sick. We seemed to have gotten it about a day apart and I got it worse than Nick did. I ended up going to the Walk-in Clinic and was diagnosed with a Sinus infection and was put on antibiotics. So far, Colton hasn't seemed to have gotten what we had, for which we are very grateful.

Here are a couple of new photos of Colton!  Thank goodness he is getting his hair cut on Friday!

When we were in Indy on the 7th, we ate a The Cheesecake Factory and let Colton have a piece of hard bread....

I mentioned starting a new meal and work out plan.  Nick and I started doing 21 day Fix on Monday. It's a program by Beachboy that teaches you portion control and gets you moving. We have a meal plan for the week (that took 5 hours to put together) and a workout for each day. So far, so good. we are both sore but not hungry!  We took before pictures so when we are done, maybe I'll post them! Hope everyone has a good week!