what a long, strange trip it's been

yeah, no...this is not a post about the greatful dead. in fact, i'm not even a dead fan but i was looking through some cd's yesterday and i guess my husband has a couple of copies of that album and the title just seemed to fit the way i have been feeling the past week.

so, since my last post we have been discharged from the hospital. it was found on sunday that evan did not have an infection in his picc line afterall. the first blood culture was probably contaminated and gave a false positive. the second and third cultures grew absolutely nothing. now those that know me know that i'm not really all that in to god (in fact, i don't really know how i feel about god and religion...but that's another post for another time, i suppose) but i swear that there was some sort of divine intervention that lead us to the hospital for when evan had his seizures. and i am so, so thankful that we were there when it happened.

so we spent sunday night and the greater part of monday at the hospital, just waiting to get the all clear from the neurologist to go home. e had an eeg on monday morning and it came back normal, so we were told it as alright to go home. at first, evan was terribly cranky and just not himself. i was worrying that this whole episode had somehow changed him. and i was feeling sad about it. and worried. for those that don't know him, he is just the most laid back kid ever. he's always happy and cheerful and just the sweetest thing ever. seems like he got the very best qualities of both michael and i and shows those traits all the time. anyway, after 24 hours of not knowing who this child was, michael and i thought that maybe it was the increasae in the antiseizure meds that was causing the difference. so we called and spoke to the on-call neurologist about decreasing his dosage from 3ml's back to 2ml's, since the seizure were related to the fever he had. the doctor said to keep the 3 at night but to give him the 2 in the morning, so we took that to mean that we could change them both back to 2. and, sure enough, that brought our sweet angel back to his normal self. seriously, it has made all the difference in the world.

so we were able to enjoy our christmas together, at home, as a family. it was the greatest gift i have ever gotten. honestly. i know its silly to say, but i couldn't have gotten a more special gift. ever. i went from thinking that i was going to lose a child, to thinking that my child was going to be a different child, to having him back to himself and loving everyone and everything around him. and that was something that meant more to me than i could ever really put in to words.

a friend of mine once told me that once you have children you give hostages to fortune...and that they will age you in dog years. and boy, was she ever right.