Palmer College of Chiropractic!

A lot has happened to our little family in the last few months!  Since Tom's Neurosurgeon suggested that he not join the army because of the risk of really hurting his head, we had to rearrange things a little bit!  Tom got a job in the Shock Trauma ICU at IMC in Murray in July so that we could get the experience that he needed for other CRNA schools to accept him.  This was a really hard transition for us.  It was about an hour drive each direction and he was working a lot of night shifts.  He was still weak and recovering from his surgery, so we didn't feel that traveling home everyday and trying to get good, uninterrupted sleep was going to work out very well. So luckily Tom's parents were kind enough to let him stay at their house during his stretch of work shifts, and then he would come home after he was done for the week.  After a lot of praying and trying to find answers, we came to the conclusion that we would switch career paths, since becoming a CRNA would most likely mean that we would not be able to live in Utah, close to family.  We started applying to so Nurse Practitioner programs and were getting ready to start one in January, but Tom was never, ever excited about this path. He would have been able to keep working full time while doing an Online Degree and then potentially be hired on as an NP wherever he was working, but he was not excited... he was going to do it because it was a better route for our family, but he was not really looking forward to doing that for the rest of his life.

We had been going to see a chiropractor by the name of Shon Goulding, for almost a year.  He was performing lots of miracles for our little family and our health!  He did chiropractics, muscle activation and NAET (an allergy elimination technique).  Coming from a Nursing background, it took Tom a little while to come on board to the more holistic way of healing the body, but he eventually did!  One day we were sitting in the waiting room and I was reading some of the patient's testimonials hanging on the wall.  One in particular was from a man who suffered from severe allergies to smells and lots of environmental things.  I mentioned to Tom that we needed to let his Uncle Tom and Aunt Melody know about Dr. Goulding, because they had very similar stories as this testimonial.  We left that day and something changed!  He talked to his dad, who then talked to his brother and sister about coming down from Canada to be treated.  That day, Tom told me that he "wants to be just like Dr. Goulding"!  He wants to be able to help people... really help them, like Dr. Goulding has done for us.  We got to work looking into schools and upon the recommendation from Dr. Goulding, we applied for Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa!  This was about the middle of September.  The school called Tom and basically just from talking to him and learning about his educational and professional background, accepted him into the school.  We were assuming that we would start in March of next year, but they asked him if he would like to start on October 31st!  We said "Yes" originally, but after a few days of thinking about it and discussing our options, we decided to defer until March.  We had just paid off all of Tom's medical bills and we had no money saved up for a moving truck.  And Tom really wanted to go through the NAET course and become a Practitioner before he started school so he could be treating people. And we wanted to get as many extra shifts as we could at work to save up some money.  Tom felt very strongly that the Lord wanted us there in October, but we just couldn't figure it out financially.

We learned our lesson in faith very quickly.  Tom was able to get his training down for NAET in just a few days and we had a lot of tender mercies surrounding that, that allowed him to get it done. And literally the week after we told Palmer that we could not start until March, the patient census at the hospital dropped drastically and Tom was shorted 2 of his 3 shifts that week.  We weren't even getting our regular shifts, let alone any extras, and we burned through all of our PTO.  Palmer had still invited Tom and I to come tour the campus, so we decided to do that.  As we were driving from Utah to Iowa on Sunday, October 9th, we felt, again, very strongly that the Lord wanted us there in October.  We prayed about it and talked to Admissions and Financial Aid at the school and everything fell right into place for us to start in a few weeks.  We were even able to look at and find an awesome duplex to rent, just a few miles from the school.  Not only that, but the landlords are a great LDS couple and have quickly become our friends!

We had just over 2 weeks to get packed and moved to Iowa.  My parents graciously offered to drive our stuff out for us and help us move in.  My grandparents let us borrow their truck and some awesome neighbors lent us their enclosed trailer.  (More tender mercies!)  Since being here we have seen the Lord's hand in everything!  It has not been easy being so far away from family and friends, but the Lord has made everything work out for us!  We are being taken care of financially! Tom got a $6000 scholarship this trimester, we qualified for some state assistance,.... things are just working out.  Tom loves school. We love our house.  The ward is awesome!  Tanner will hopefully be starting preschool soon.  Everything is just working out!  I am soooo glad that we listened to the promptings from the Spirit and took this gigantic leap of faith!

   

   Here are some pictures of our home for the next 3 years!

The front room, off to the right as you walk in the front door.

As you walk in the front door, you can either go right, into the front room, or go straight into the family room (I was standing in the living room when I took this picture).

Family Room (taken standing in the kitchen)

The Kitchen

 The awesome walk in Pantry! Shelves all the way to the ceiling!  Oh! Did I mention we have 9 foot ceilings on the main level!

Leading upstairs

Tiny Bathroom

 Olivia's Room 

(No! She doesn't sleep in her big bed yet. Still in the pack and play! Haha! Maybe soon!)

Tanner's Room

Our Room

There is also a large basement and a big attic for storage.  There are no pictures of the attic because a few days after we moved in, Tom found some bats up there.  If any of you know me...  I HATE BATS!  So, I will most likely never go up there again! (The landlord came over and filled a few holes after we opened some windows to let the bats out, and Tom has not seen them since. But... I will still probably never go up there!)

Granted... Tom also found a Garter Snake in the basement too... and I have continued to go down there, but only if Tom or Tanner are with me! I know, I'm super brave!

We love it here and are excited to see what the next 3 years brings us! Hopefully no more rodents in the house!

Update on Tom

It has been a few months since Tom's surgery and he is doing great!  He went back for his post-6 weeks check up and he wasn't quite healed enough to go back to work.  Since the day of his surgery, he has had a "soft spot" on his forehead and just a few weeks before his check-up, it started filling up with fluid when he would bend over! Ahhh! It was so scary.  Dr. Maughan assured us that this was not uncommon.  It was probably CSF, and possibly because the patch job to the Dura may not have held tightly.  But he is counting on the packed sinuses to keep the fluid where it needs to be.  So, he was off for another 6 weeks so that he could completely heal.  During this time, we had a great talk with Dr. Maughan and he strongly advised against joining the army, because of risk of injury to his head. So while he was out of work, Tom applied for and got a job in the Shock Trauma ICU at IMC in Murray, which he starts this week.  Since the army isn't going to work out, we decided to get the ICU experience that he needs for another CRNA school to accept him.

So here we are, again, starting another journey... a very unexpected one.  But as we look back at all the many tender mercies that we have received over the past year, we are truly humbled and feel extremely blessed!  We felt prompted to get moving, to work towards grad school and that was getting going with the Army.  We felt prompted to sell our house during the summer, so that we wouldn't have to try and sell during the winter before we left for Texas.  Our house sold in less than a week!  From the sale of the house, we were able to pay off our cars.  So... when, 2 months later, Tom got so sick, and over the next 6 months of doctor's visits and surgery... we had no mortgage or car payments.  Things have not worked out the way we thought they would, but we have been taken care of and we are extremely grateful for the promptings, ways before Tom got sick, that got us prepared for what was to come.  What a very humbling experience for us!

Here are some pics of Tom's recovery!  You can't even see his scar!

We are so extremely grateful that we still have this crazy man in our lives!

Meningitis

The morning of November 5, 2015 (Thursday) will be a day that I will never forget and that changed our lives drastically.  The kids and I had been sick with super yucky colds for a few weeks and we were so grateful that Tom hadn't been sick also.  He came home Wednesday night from work, helped me get the kids in bed, get me settled on the couch (since that is where I had been sleeping all week to try and let him get some sleep), and he told me he was going to bed because he didn't feel very good.  He had a pretty bad headache and felt like he was getting a fever.  Both of us just chalked it up to it being his turn for the yuckies.  I finally talked him into taking some Tylenol before bed (because he was starting with a fever and chills) and we all went to sleep.  The next morning, I woke up super groggy from cold medicine and not sleeping all night.  I realized that I didn't remember seeing Tom come in the kitchen for breakfast before he left for work.  Tanner woke up about that time and came into me and wanted something. I told him to go ask his daddy.  He came back a few minutes later and said, "Mom. I tried to talk to Daddy but he won't say anything to me!"  My first thought was "Oh! The man cold!" and I wondered if he had called into work to let them know he wasn't coming that day.  I tried to rouse him, but he wouldn't talk to me either.  He would open his eyes and moan out in pain.  He was BURNING UP!  I tried several times to get him to wake up and take something for the fever, but he would not respond.  As I was trying to wake up and figure out what was going on, I randomly remembered Tom telling me about the first time he had had meningitis and how his friends had found him and what he was acting like.  It was exactly like what was going on now.  I texted Kathy and told her what was going on and asked it sounded familiar and her response was "Get him to the hospital, NOW!"

I had called my mom and told her I couldn't get him to wake up or talk to me and she suggested getting an ice cube and rubbing it on his forehead to try and wake him (since flicking water in his face had not worked).  As soon as the ice touched him, he smacked my hand, throwing the ice across the room and yelled "Stop it!"  All I could do was laugh!  But after that, I couldn't get him to react or talk again.  I was starting to wake up and get really worried.  My mom hung up and called Lynette Wilson, who is an EMT and she came up to help me.  She had also called my Grandpa and a neighbor to come give Tom a blessing.  Lynette showed up with 2 of her daughters and after trying to wake Tom, calmly looked at me and said,  "I think it's time to call 911."  I had no voice, due to my cold, so she called for me.  Her sweet daughters took care of my kids for me.  Tom received a blessing and the EMTs showed up.  After not being able to wake or rouse him either, the put him in the ambulance and rushed him to the hospital.  He was very sensitive to pain, and would not let them prick his finger to test his blood sugar levels! Haha!

When we got to the Emergency Room, they began to do some tests and to ask me questions.  My mom was there with me and Tom's parents were also there.  I told the doctors that Tom had had Meningitis 2 other times and this seemed very similar. They did a spinal tap to confirm that it was indeed a third bout of Meningitis. Tom was admitted to the 3rd floor, where he worked, and was put in a semi-private room.  His manager hand picked the staff that would take care of Tom and he was really treated well.  Thursday evening, Dr. Houghton (the doctor who admitted Tom) pulled me aside and told me that he had NEVER seen a case of Meningitis this bad.  Tom's numbers were off the charts.  He said that any extra prayers and blessings he could get, he needed, because he was fighting for his life.  He told me that really Tom should be in the ICU, but he was holding stable.  He would stay of 3rd floor IMC, but the ICU was on alert, incase anything changed with Tom's condition.  Tom received another Priesthood blessing that night.  Tom's dad offered to stay the night with him so that I could go home and get some sleep and take care of the kids.  Tom was still out of it all night.  He was agitated and in pain and kept trying to rip his tubes out.  They finally had to restrain him to the bed so for his own safety.  The next afternoon (friday) around 2:00 Tom finally started becoming aware of his surroundings and started to talk and respond to us. Dr. Houghton was astonished that he was doing as well as he was, considering the state he was in the night before.  Tom remained in the hospital until Monday afternoon, when we were finally able to go home.  He had been cleared by the Infectious Disease doctor and all his labs were looking good.  He was sent home with a PIC line and antibiotics for several weeks.

Over the next several months, we spent a lot of time with doctor after doctor, trying to figure out what keeps causing him to get Meningitis and what we could do to prevent it from happening again.  We were told several times that if he gets this again, he most likely will not survive it, so we were very very proactive about finding a solution.  We met with Dr. Winters, a Neurosurgeon at McKay and he did several exams and CT scans trying to find answers.  We (us and the doctors) determined that Tom's really bad car accident that he had on his 19th birthday (almost 18 years before this) that had caused so much facial trauma, must have caused a CSF (Cerebral Spinal Fluid) leak somewhere, which was causing the recurrent Meningitis.  But for all of our efforts and scans, no leak could be found.  Dr. Winters sent us to see Dr. Ramirez, an ENT.  Tom and I both felt like it was a useless effort to go see him, but Oh My Goodness! Are we ever grateful that we did!  He stayed after hours to see Tom and did another CT scan, sitting up this time.  By the time we left his office that night, he had determined that because of the facial trauma from the crash, his Right Frontal Sinus had collapsed and was not draining properly. So, every time Tom would get sick or get a sinus infection, it had nowhere to go, but back into his brain.  We were told that a Craniotomy was necessary to open him up and get to the sinus to fix it.  We opted to have the surgery in Murray at the IMC hospital, so that meant another month or so of seeing new doctors.  Dr. Maughan was our new Neurosurgeon, and he was really hesitant to do the surgery.  Mostly because he really didn't know what to expect until they actually opened Tom's head up, and that is scary.  He wanted to do the surgery with an ENT that he works with, so we then met Dr. Sharma, who as soon as he saw Tom's labs and scans, was in total agreement to proceed with the surgery.  He even told us that if Tom had been his patient years ago, he would have done the surgery then and he never (or most likely) wouldn't have gotten Meningitis a 3rd time!

Tom had his surgery on April 29, 2016 (friday) and it went really well.  Dr's Maughan and Sharma came to talk to my dad and I in the waiting room after the surgery and told us they were so glad they did the surgery.  Once they got Tom opened up, they found that there was a bony structure (cause from the crash) with a sharp jagged piece of bone at the back, that had poked and ruptured the Dura (membrane) around the brain, and that the brain was actually sitting on the bone!  AHHH!  If he had gotten in another accident or even hit his head too hard, something really bad could have happened.  When the Dura was repaired, they found that there actually was a very slow CSF leak.  They patched the Dura and packed both Frontal Sinuses with fat and closed him back up.  Tom was only in the ICU that day and then moved to the medical floor.  He only had one dose of narcotics, and then only had Ibuprofen the rest of the time!  His face swelled up quite a bit and bruised some, but he really did surprisingly well!  We was sent home on Sunday morning and he is expected to be out of work for at least 6 weeks. 

We are so gratefully for all of the tender mercies and all our guardian angels that have been with us over the last 6 months!  We are so truly blessed to have been guided and directed in the ways we have! 

Pre Surgery Prep!

Before

 During

 After

Right after Surgery

2 days after Surgery (the day he came home)