TIME in the DOCTOR'S OFFICE

May 11, 2010

First of all, we just purchased our tickets to fly back to Paraguay July 7th! It looks like a pretty nice itinerary too (anything looks nice compared to our itinerary to get here). Once that was done, SIM needed us all to get physicals and declared medically cleared to leave. Although it is never really easy to get a family of 7 in and out of a doctor’s office smoothly, it was helpful that we were able to go Jeff’s office. One of the nurses was gracious enough to meet us an hour before the clinic opened. We got 7 urine cultures (which by the way, Micah LOVED peeing in the cup! All morning he kept asking for a cup so he could potty in it again), 6 TB tests, 7 blood draws, blood pressure, weight, head and waist circumference on all the kids, temperature, heart, lungs, vision screens, etc. I took my 27 week glucose tolerance test.

That afternoon, we were informed that the lab told the clinic the wrong color of tubes to use for the blood draws and we all need to get stick again (I thought things like that only happened in Paraguay)! The following morning we went up again an hour before the clinic opened in order to be re-stuck. Turns out (thankfully) that they were able to use the blood from the three older kids and only Tyler and Micah needed to be stuck again (they were not too happy). The kids were so brave though. They had an especially hard time hitting a vein on Tyler and had to poke him several times….he held still but he did scream/cry both times (which freaked Micah out even more since he was next). However, in the car, after it was all over Tyler declared, “Yeah! Now we get to go home to Paraguay!”

And….if all that time in the doctor’s office wasn’t enough….my blood sugar came back WAY high so I had to go back another morning for a 3 hour fasting blood sugar test. In between sticks, I sat in Jeff’s office and prayed my levels would be normal – especially in light of the fact that we want to deliver in Paraguay with the least amount of complications as possible. Praise the Lord…all my labs were great. The first really high reading must have been a machine glitch.

Jeff had more needles come his way too. Because we redid our life insurance policy, Jeff had to get a physical from the company. They, of course had to drawn the same labs he had just had drawn. So…that is a total (and record) of 23 sticks for our family in a week!