Prayer

Below is an email that Karla sent last night. I'm copying it to the blog because we want you to pray for us. This is the main reason we started this blog. So that we could report on how we are doing so that you might pray with and for us. We are praying for a healing miracle for Drew. We believe with our whole beings that a healing miracle is possible because we believe in a God of miracles. We also believe that miracles and answers to prayer happen in ways that we may not understand (means and consequences) but that we are to put all of our trust, hope and faith in God.

Thank you for your prayers.

Hi everyone,

I know many of you are still praying for Drew on a regular basis, but we have some very specific requests today so I thought I'd send an email.

Basically, well, we need a miracle. Drew still often holds his breath when he cries. While we call it breath holding our Doctors always remind us that this is not the benign breath holding seen in toddlers throwing temper tantrums, instead they consider each event to be life threatening and are concerned about unknown neurological consequences adding up over months with multiple episodes of short term lack of oxygen to the brain. So something has to be done, but no one really knows what. One possibility is to give Drew a g-tube, so he can reliably be given a medication that may or may not work to decrease his episodes. We've been trying to give him this med for the last 3 months with little success as it tastes absolutely horrible and giving him his twice daily dose often causes him to hold his breath (we've tried every trick in the book). A g-tube would be a no brainer if we knew for sure that the med worked (it's an off-label use of a drug not available in canada but sold elsewhere over the counter as a cognitive enhancer, among other things...Its called Piracetam if anyone's interested), but we still can't tell if it is having a positive effect on Drew. It seems extreme to make a baby go through (albeit minor) surgery for something that may or may not work, but the only other choice is to take a risk and wait and see if things get better. But we've been doing that for a while and the risk seems to be getting bigger as his episodes are getting more extreme.

We don't know how to make this choice, so we're praying for a miracle: that Drew would never hold his breath again. We've decided that if he holds his breath one more time we will head to the hospital and discuss g-tube options. To put this into context, he typically holds his breath 5-10 times a week. Praying for no more breath holding episodes may seem like a big request but I believe God is big enough.
This is why: Many of you know that David used to have frequent (multiple times a week) and debilitating migraine headaches. He had these for years and nothing any Doctor suggested worked. Nothing I could do helped. No triggers were identifiable, no lifestyle modifications had any influence. There was simply no way we could help ourselves. We prayed and prayed, and then one night a few years ago David came home from a prayer meeting and told me he felt he had been healed, and that the burden of recurrent migraines had been lifted. And I thought, yeah right. Since that night David has had maybe 2 migraine headaches. So I know that God can do this sort of miracle. And I kind of feel like I'm in that same place. There is nothing that I can do to stop Drew's breath holding, but it is in precisely this place that God can work.

So please pray for this miracle, and also pray that we will have peace in the decisions we make and that we will see God's hand working no matter the outcome.


(in other news, the Drewster has two wee teeth and is trying so hard to crawl!)


Love,
K&D&d