New Pics!

Here's some recent pictures of Kyle - the only pictures of his surgery scar so far....

Update

Somehow I'm hanging in there at school but it's been a challenge. I thought for sure that I was going to fail the anatomy & physiology classes but I managed to get an A. Chris says he won't listen when I freak out anymore since I've freaked on almost every final, but have gotten all A's.

Now I'm done with the general education requirement and have moved on to the core classes. Right now I'm taking Essentials of Sonography and Introduction to Pharmacology with our new teacher Mrs. Rudolph. We're still in the first week so we haven't gotten too far along... mostly terminology so far. But today the teacher treated us to a "field trip" to the lab (next door to our classroom) and did an echo on one of my classmates to show what it will be like. It really got us pumped to see the echo done and know that we'll be starting scanning in a couple short weeks, ourselves. When Mrs. Rudolph put the transducer onto my classmate's chest and the image of his heart appeared on the monitor, I was at once excited that I could recognize the mitral valve! This may not seem like a big deal to some of you but considering I didn't know what the mitral valve was until earlier this month.... I'm tickled pink!

In the meantime, Kyle has still got about a million doctor appointments. My mom is taking him to most of the appointments and that's helping quite a bit. It's still exhausting juggling the scheduling of appointments, home health equipment, feeding schedule, insurance, normal monthly bills, household chores, and somewhere in the middle, a life! It doesn't take much to push me over the edge lately. I go three days and need to get out! I've been swing dancing with Jenn a couple of times and even gone out to Ybor a couple of times. But a couple of days of early mornings to get to school, followed by work at school, followed by long drives home, followed by getting feedings, cleaning out the feeding pump, studying, and nights interrupted by loud alarms from the apnea monitor, feeding pump or tempermental alarm clocks and I'm screaming for freedom! Unfortunately freedom in the form of going out with friends and drinking, dancing, eating, etc. usually costs money... which increases the stress on the day to day stuff.