Personal thoughts on dearelena today....

So I keep up with the No Fluff Just Stuff guys and Daniel Steinberg has suffered the kind of loss you can never be prepared for.  My heart goes out to his family during this time of grief.  He created a mini blog dearelena that hits very close to home and my wife and I share the sentiments he expresses in his last post this morning. 

As many of you know I am the father of 5 fantastic and energetic children who bring me no end of joy and happiness.  In 2001, during a very busy time in our lives my oldest son came down with what we thought was the flu.  Unlike the Elena's outcome he recovered and we often refer to him as our miracle child.

I don't know what was the cause of Elena's death and I won't speculate, but Ethan's appendix burst and the symptoms were entirely flu-like much like Elena's.  He was in and out of the hospital twice for starvation and dehydration before Aetna would allow a CAT scan of his stomach and he had dropped almost 15lbs in weight.  Then he entered the hospital again to drain the 3 grapefruit size abcesses, mucous balls of infection, and finished his series of hospital stays a month later to have is appendix removed. 

He was lucky and very blessed to have survived.  Many do not as the surgeon enlightened us at the children's hospital where he had his infection drained.  The situation is that children don't normally come down with appendicitis and most pediatricians or family physicians mis-diagnose it, but with today's fast food lifestyle children are much more at risk for appendicitis than they were in the past.  Only 1 year later, Ethan's cousin came down with appendicitis and they were able to identify it the night it burst because we had already seen the same symptoms the year before. 

His symptoms:

• He could not keep even small amounts of water down nor go more than 30 minutes without a trip to the bathroom.
• When he threw up it was a yellow mucous and the same yellow mucous when he went to the bathroom ( we later found out this was a mixture of the infection and mucous from his burst appendix. )
• During the entire time he had severe abdominal pain and could not sleep more than a few minutes at time
• The exception to the severe abdominal pain is the few hours after the appendix actually bursts, then the pain becomes significantly worse