His Mercies

June 29, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita Hochstetler2 Comments

“When everything falls apart

His love catches me.”

And thank Him! Not everything has fallen apart!

I was feeling a bit ‘on the verge’ today a few times and had to firmly tell myself to be brave and envision all the prayers lifting to heaven for us and think of all the brave folks I have met in life that have faced difficulties with their heads up and hung onto the promise of our Jesus…’I will guide Thee with My eye..”

This morning, Kierra’s blood pressure was still scandalously high. She wasn’t responding well to any medication on the general floor, so she was transferred to PICU. They can treat her more aggressively here and monitor her more closely.

She actually didn’t look too bad but her numbers were wayyy up there. After trying to put her on a Vapor oxygen and having her get so worked up she nearly choked, they decided to let her breathe room air since she was staying above 90. She had alot of noisy airway breaths that sounded bad more then actually being harmful.

Around 9:30, OR came over and wheeled her away for her PIC line and scope. I got the kind nurse to take a picture of us before she was traumatized and sedated.

I did some laundry, made phone calls, and visited the cafeteria while she was in the OR. It was a lovely part of the day outside so I took advantage of the sunshine and water fountain in the courtyard.Finally finally, she was done, and I hurried back to the room to my little sweet heart.

Her airways were sounding a little tight so they inserted a tube like thingy down one nostril and put a collar round her neck to open them wider. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

She started gagging at one time and her oxygen levels started dropping and the nurse grabbed the oxygen and bag to help her breath and my heart started shattering with fear. Thank God, she came around on her own after a few minutes. I was pretty shaken and kept a hawks eye on her and the monitors.

Her test results have been fairly good so far. No pneumonia at this point and her heart looked good and she DOES NOT have any sign of ulcers. That was a huge surprise, and while I’m glad she doesn’t, I also am wondering why she has had such discomfort and a little bleeding. The bleeding could be a slight irritation from meds or a virus. I hope that is the case.

She is resting well now, after her little bed bath.

The plan for her now is to try to get her blood pressure lower and stable. I’m so thankful she has a PIC line which makes labs SO MUCH EASIER!!!!!

We are still in ICU but after she is more stabilized in her b.p. we will most likely be moved to the general floor. It’s nice to have our own room!And generally a quieter night, then upstairs. The kitchen and coffee pot are just across the hallway, so I’m set up 🙂 Except if my little girly sleeps, I think i will stretch out as well…

My whole day was blessed by the kind friend who took food to our house! And last night, another thoughtful lady sent supper with Steve. We are so blessed!

Thanks for all your prayers! Please keep praying.

Blessings!

Special Kids

Hello Hospital

June 28, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita Hochstetler3 Comments

Sitting in the dark hospital room, listening to Kierra breathe, Enya playing softly, bubbling oxygen water and the night squeaks outside in the corridor.
this was not how we planned our weekend at all! Our good friends, Kenton andMeghen from MT. planned to be at our house a few days surrounding a wedding in Mifflinburg. I was looking forward to this for months! And we had shopping and coffee and a family photo shoot planned since Meghen so kindly offered to use her fun wonderful talent on our little family.
Amazing. The plans God has. And how totally different they are from our best expectations!
Kentons got delayed flying and didnt arrive untill about 24 HR LATER!
and we ended our day in the hospital with Kierra.
She’s still got us puzzled since her blood pressure is rediculously high even on meds. Last night they planned to move her to PICU but it started coming down again. She has good color and is still happy and irritable. By spells, which is typical.
Yesterday they did an ultrasound on her kidneys and an Echo on her heart. Now today they plan to do a belly scope to try to find the cause of the blood we’ve been catching glimpses of. She will have to be put to sleep so pray that all goes well! And that her blood pressure would go down and that the cause of it being high could be found!
Thankyou all! We feel God with us!

Special Kids

My Lesson on Bath Water

June 25, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita Hochstetler1 Comment

Just when you think things may perhaps be leveling out…the unexpected happens AGAIN!

I ‘never’ let Kobe sit in the tub with Kierra at bath time. I use our shower stall, and there is very little extra space for a one year old who LOVES baths and bubbles.

Friday morning, I relented and reassured myself that it would keep him from picking up the shampoo bottle and soap bottle and towel and washcloth and generally leaning over and around and on me and getting in the way , so i let him sit in the back of the shower and even gave a healthy squirt of bubbles to the water when he begged.

I had just gotten Kierra nicely situated and was wetting the washcloth, when to my stupefied horror, i saw her brother with a cup of water moving toward her head and stared as he DUMPED it squarely onto her face!

And it all happened so fast and yet, the images are frozen in slow motion in my mind.

Her little white teeth, bright against her red lips. her tilted back head and closed eyes as she relaxed in warm water.

And then, Kobe’s totally innocent expression as he emptied the cup of water onto that sweet upturned face. Dear child. He was only trying to wash her hair like he has seen me do so many times.

She choked and sputtered and gagged and i tried to sit her up, but she only slipped and slid and i wanted to pound her back, but she was an eel out of control. Poor poor pumpkin!

I felt like calling the Dr. immediately with my big concern for aspiration, but felt really foolish and told myself that it was most likely not enough water to harm her. Don’t all kids drink bath water sometime in life?

All weekend I watched her closely and couldn’t decide if I was imagining symptoms of aspiration or not.

Today, she had a routine appointment and I was SO thankful! She had a slight fever and was breathing extremely rapidly. Respiratory was around 60 a minute! That was over twice as fast as ‘normal’. There was a slight crackle in her upper lung. The Dr. suspected it was the beginning of a pneumonia most likely caused by bacteria in the water she aspirated. He said even soapy water could cause this. Now she’s on antibiotic again, and we need to watch her respiratory closely over the next 48 hours.

She is resting well right now, and her respiratory is down to around 40, Praise the Lord!

Lesson learned~ Single child bathing ONLY with Kierra!! 🙂

If you would be so kind to breathe a prayer for her recovery, we would be so obliged!

P.S. How he LOVES her ! ❤

Thoughts On Life

A Splash Of Color For Your Day

June 21, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita Hochstetler1 Comment

I’m a far cry from a great photographer, but I love color and beauty so although these photos lack quality, I hope you can enjoy a quick scroll through another culture and country.

There’s something about the brightness of the market that always reaches out and delights the eyes.

spice rack….savory!

a rainy afternoon on the streets. plastic bags work great for rain gear 🙂

don’t you just feel like indulging in fruit?

And then the not so great part of town where they hauled huge slabs of beef on their dirty shirted shoulders and threw them onto the back of dirty little pickup trucks…and chopped meat on the open market. And the cereal? I’m assuming they weighed your amount out for you.

catching some zzzs maybe next time i should try a comfy sidewalk for a nap:)

happiness to you today!

Special Kids

Of Travel and MicKeys.

June 17, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita Hochstetler4 Comments

We did the thing I didn’t think I would ever do! And was it ever fun 🙂 We bought tickets, checked our passports, made arrangements to leave Kierra with family, and left the country for 7 days! Now maybe this doesn’t sound so amazing, but for us,it really is a miracle!

I don’t know how often i thought we were totally nuts to go and leave Kierra behind. It was one of those things we thought God wanted us to do and we wanted to do and we thought we should do and it worked out to do. So we did it. And I tried to just turn my mind numb to all the things that COULD happen. And guess what? Most of them DIDN’T happen!

A week or two or was it three? 🙂 before we left. Kierra developed stomach ulcers, so we had just gotten her ‘stabilized’ as in not crying and uncomfortable or whimpering nearly every ‘awake’ moment. Her schedule was very rigid since she needed meds every 6 hr on an empty stomach and since it’s hard to get her necessary amount of feeding into her in a 24 hr. period without having to stop to let her stomach ’empty’.

So with an hourly schedule

lots of medication info (she was on at least 10 different meds :()

suction info (for when she chokes)

oxygen info (for when she needs a boost)

what ‘sick’ looks like on her

medical care release form

and medical history forms

not to mention clothes and wipes and pampers and formula boxes and feeding pump and feeding bags and oxygen canulas and tanks and tape and suction machine and a new MicKey Gtube and syringes and hair supplies and lotion and the list didn’t seem to end…

but Jason and Karen got her all loaded and packed away safely in her car seat and Kobe and I waved goodbye and she was off for Maryland and cousin time and I was standing in my house wondering what in the world to do next and trying to think that this really would all be OK.

Believe it or not, I put Kobe down for a nap and crashed myself and woke up feeling more like a person then I had in quite some days.

I gathered our stuff together and packed our bags and we had so little compared to Kierra that i was SURE we were forgetting some drastic thing! Steve came home from work, and we finished packing. Early the next morning, we jetted off!

Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Steve’s parents are in their fourth year of mission work in the mountains of Honduras. They plan to return to the States this fall/winter, and were so thankful we could visit them before they closed this chapter in their lives. We hadn’t seen them for about a year and a half, so we had a wonderful time reconnecting and introducing Kobe to them!

A few shots of our days…

Kobe milk milk milkin. He was totally amazed!

‘visting’ with the neighbor girls

hiking and piggy back rides with Grandpa 🙂

Love this little guy 🙂

cooling off at the waterfall

A hillside covered with coffee plants. This is a huge moneymaker for the natives, but it takes LOTS of HARD manual labor.

The country is gorgeous!! Especially from the back of a truck. It’s when you carry a sick child for miles over these mountain roads that you realize what HARD is! (maybe a little like elk hunting in Montana 😉

Meanwhile, back home, Kierra was doing great after giving everyone a good scare.

She was very fussy one night, and Karen was holding her. When she went to lay her down again, to her utter horror, she found her feeding tube (MicKey) laying in her crib! She stared in panic at the empty hole in Kierra’s belly. Her nightmare had actually taken a ‘real to life’ , ‘this is happening’ turn! It was midnight and the world was asleep.

To make a long 24 hr story short 🙂 They went to the nearest good ER which was in West Virginia, since they couldn’t get the new tube in themselves. The Dr. in the Er couldn’t get it in either. Her stomach seemed to be ‘growing shut’ already. Now they had two options. Either put her through another surgery to insert a Gtube or take her to The Children’s Hospital in Deleware which was around 5 hr. away.

So they called us. I have no idea how long or often they tried to get through to us, but eventually, they called the missionary neighbors who came over and rapped on Dad’s window who eventually woke up and rapped on our door until we eventually woke up and tried to shake the cobwebs from our brains. With the time zones between here and there, we had just drifted into our first sound sleep. Karen stood in the waiting room in the ER and laughed herself silly to hear me trying to wake Steve and explain what was happening 🙂 He is a WONDERFUl sleeper. I usually envy his conked out way of shutting down!

We voted for them to go to Deleware since we trusted the Dr.s very well there, and in case of a prolonged hospital stay, it would only be an hr. drive from our house instead of 6 hr.

So they were released from one Er and started out to the next one. My parents met them in MD and drove them to Deleware. Dad had fun flashing his four ways and cruising along beside a police car for a while. They made the drive in an hour less then usual and wheeled into the ER at around 8AM. Kierra thought it a great adventure to be out and about in her carseat in the middle of the night. She cooed and laughed and had no idea of the stress everyone else was in.

The Dr. at Dupont was SUPER! I think God had him there for a reason! He worked gently and efficiently and got a tiny catheter into her belly. Every half hour, he inserted a slightly larger one until he had her all the way up to her regular size!

Now don’t you call that a God Thing!! Just a little discomfort and lots of stress for her caregivers…but God came through…just like always 🙂 And this time, there was NO Surgery!

I was one relieved Mama! I was ready to pack my bags and fly back on the next flight out when i heard the word Surgery 🙂

We totally enjoyed the rest of our time and I think Kierra did too. It did me a world of good to have a change of scenery and pace of life. To see a Big Beautiful World out there that is full of God and hurting folks that need His Love!

Kobe loved flying! The clouds looked like ‘bubbles’ to him from the plane window 🙂

We had a dead van battery when we landed in BWI at midnight:( Kobe slept most of the time as we waited for the jumper guy to come by. He was VERY tired of traveling though! 🙂

Can’t you tired gritty ‘can’t open my eyes’ ‘middle of the night’ ‘let me alone’ feeling!

Were we ever THRILLED to get home and snuggle her again! Oh how I LOVE her!!!

meds and all 🙂

coming up next….just a bunch of brightness for those who love color!

Thoughts On Life

This Could Have Been Me.

June 14, 2013November 1, 2019 Anita HochstetlerLeave a comment

Our 7 day trip to visit Steve’s folks in Honduras gave me so many new thoughts to process.

One evening, my mother -in -law invited the new 28 yr old neighbor boy to stay for supper. We all gathered round the brightly lit kitchen table and thanked God for the food. Then we chatted and laughed as the bowls passed from hand to hand, and everyone helped themselves.

The Boy sat at the end of the table, hands clasped politely, securely in his lap. He did not reach for the serving bowl when it came to him. We all continued spooning our food out and pretended not to notice as Tim, sitting just around the corner from him,asked him if he would like some vegetables. He sat silently, nodding or shaking his head as each dish passed him. When the food had all been around, he gently raised his hands, took up his fork, and began to eat. Later, when the fruit and cake were passed around, I dared to glance fleetingly his way. Once again, he sat with his hands tucked securely under the table. But his face lit up like a child in a candy shop when Tim reached a piece of cake onto his place. I hope I never forget that smile. And that sheepish delight over a piece of cake.

We went to visit him in his quarters. Then I understood. His mother had abandoned him years ago. He had no home but a neighbor had allowed him to use one of their shacks for a shelter.

Termites were eating away at the wood, and the roof leaked awfully. It was just barely better then nothing.

When he first came into the area, looking for work, he was not a Christian. One night, during the cold rains that soak Honduras in rainy season, he found his way to the mission house and asked if they have an extra board. He needed it for his bed, since the water was flooding his board “bed” he had in his ‘house’.

Imagine! Not a blanket or mattress. Simply an extra board for the night.

They gave him a board and took a thick foam and sheet along for him as well.

Now this is his bed. And his home.

The rain still leaks through the roof onto his bed.

But that cannot dim the love of God he accepted into his heart. His whole countenance changed! He works at the mission now, and has bought himself a few new clothing articles.

He learned to cook rice from my mother in law. He took us behind his house to see his kitchen.

He is working toward a new life. And the hope he has in God burns in him and he’s learning to read.

And this is only one of the hundreds and thousands in the world that have so little. And I think of Almighty God , high above the Earth, looking down, and placing me in America. And him in a field in Honduras.

I have so much! Summer and winter clothing. ‘Every day’ and ‘company’ dishes. Hot showers and pairs of shoes. Boots and flip flops and a soft bed and piles of blankets and a washer and dryer. Fans and umbrellas and a van to travel in.

It doesn’t seem fair at all. Then I remember- it’s all about God and eternity! And His Love and Mercy reach down and embrace all types of hearts and saves souls from gutters to palaces!

And in Heaven-we will all praise Him together and we will all be more blessed then the billioniest billionaire!! And it all started at the Cross.

And just a few more pictures to make you so thankful for our simple American pleasures.

A junk yard in the middle of town.

Laundry drying brightly on the topmost level of apartment complexes.

These people live just outside the garbage dump. They make their homes from other folks trash.

Children grow up here.

In the corner of the busy city in mid morning.

This could be me.