August 30 - End of Summer Update

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence rely not.
In all your ways be mindful of him, and He will make straight your paths."
-Proverbs 3:5-6

It has been a busy summer for Annie. She went to Montana for a Fuglevand family reunion over the 4th of July, and then on to Butte Montana to be with Jane's family for the month of July. At the end of the month she flew back to Seattle and then on to Mexico with her dad to catch up with the church youth group on a mission trip to Teajuana (sp?) to build housing for the poor. Then she traveled back to Montans for the first week of August for a few last days at her grandparents cabin at Canyon Ferry. From there she traveled back to Redmond for the rest of August. She stated classes at Dratmore (Spanish and math review) and is signed up to start classes at Bellevue Community College (BCC) in September. She needs a couple of classes to finish high school, and she will do that with a couple of college classes that will count towards both her high school diploma and college credit. She will take classes at BCC this year, and then hopes to enter a 4-year college next fall. Right now she is thinking about nursing - she certainly knows what that is like and feels she could be good at it.

Through it all her new liver has been doing well. As of last week the transplant team continues to be pleased with the stability of the liver. The doctors have tapered down her medicines over the summer - she still takes about 8 medicines, some twice a day. Even though the liver is doing well she has not felt so good the last half of August. She started haveing more neurological events mid month that have seemed to progress. On Monday of this week Annie had a long episode at home where she lost consciencenes for about three hours. Half way through it we called 911 and Annie was taken to Children's hospital. After several hours in the emergency room she was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) on Monday night where she spent a couple of days and underwent extensive neurological testing. Initilally they thought Annie was suffering from swelling of the brain, but addtional evaluations proved that not to be the case. Other tests eliminated tumors, eliminated brain infections, and eliminated epilepsy. She was discharged from the hospital today, still uncetrtain what is causing these episodes. Possibilities include a rare form of migrains that cause siezures of this form, and possibly food realted alergies that can trigger some episodes. We will be looking at these over the near future.



,