Well it appears that I’ve gone blog crazy over the last few days since I’ve posted now three times this week…thankfully this excessive blogging will end soon for our blog readers as soon as I start a brutal week of multiple call days at the cardiac ICU at the VA. Today was a very special day for us as we got to rejoice with my sister, Christine, as she married her new husband, Stan Mathew.
We have a busy weekend coming up with my sister Christine’s wedding but before the festivities begin today we wanted to post some long overdue pictures from our friend’s George & Kara Morris’ wedding and our trip to Florida to visit Disney World. Have a great weekend! Read more…
Warning: medically intense post ahead! The last few months have involved a lot of one on one patient care and I wanted to take some time to share the stories of some of my patients and I’m hoping it will be somewhat cathartic for me while at the same time allowing those that follow our blog some insight into the lives and issues raised by the people that I care for. To protect my patients’ privacy I’ve changed some of their identifying details.
Clearly we have not done the greatest job keeping the blog updated over the last two months or so. Hopefully I’ll be able to remedy part of that this evening. Since our last update, I’ve finished two more rotations of intern year, Vivek has gotten to 3 months, we made a 4500 mile road trip to North Carolina, Florida & Alabama, made another road trip to San Antonio and have spent lots of time in our garden. Read more…
Daily Living, Family, Food, Medicine, Pictures, Residency, Travel
I think it has been over a month since we last updated the blog…we wanted to make sure people didn’t think we fell off the face of the earth! We are doing well although I’m right now in the midst of two weeks of nights and so that has my schedule pretty messed up and disconnected from the rest of the world. Vivek will be two months tomorrow! He has been growing well although his sleep habits still leave much to be desired for Melissa with plenty of nights when he is up three to four times in an evening. Read more…
We have not done a great job of keeping the blog updated but I’m going to claim it’s all because of three children under 4 in our home. We are actually doing extremely well and Vivek is growing like a weed. We had written earlier about how Vivek’s bilirubin was elevated when we left the hospital but after two more checks at the doctor his levels came back down quickly. He has been sleeping and eating a lot. Just this past week he started being awake a little more often but still sleeps or eats away most of his hours in a day. Of our three kids, it seems that Vivek has slept more than the other two…perhaps he is trying to catchup on lost sleep since he came about three weeks early!
We finally got home this afternoon three days after going into the hospital for Melissa’s early c-section. Both Melissa and Vivek are doing well. Vivek is a little jaundiced and his bilirubin levels are a little higher than normal and so we’ll need to go in for a repeat bilirubin check with his pediatrician tomorrow but other than that Vivek seems like he is doing extremely well and is adjusting to life at home. Thank you for all your prayers for us during this time. Melissa tells me that this was by far the best recovery she has had after her c-sections. We have both been extremely impressed by the excellent care we received in the L&D department at Parkland and Melissa even says that if she could do it again she would have chosen to have Karuna at Parkland when we were in Dallas before rather than the private hospital we went to before.
Our third little guy decided to make an early appearance when Melissa went into labor on Sunday. Melissa woke up Sunday morning not feeling very good and thought she had caught the stomach flu because she felt sick to her stomach. We decided to not go to church that morning because she was feeling so crummy and by later that morning she began to have full strength contractions that started off about 5 minutes apart and then progressed to about three minutes apart.
Greetings! We are enjoying a great weekend of just hanging out together especially after my busy three weeks on internal medicine. I finished my internal medicine rotation last week and started anesthesiology on Monday…what a relief it has been to be on a normal schedule where I get home by early afternoon, am not on call and have my weekends off! Anesthesia has gotten off to a great start and I’ve done almost 20 intubations (for those not in the medical field it is process of putting someone off to sleep when they get to the operating room and then putting a tube into their trachea to help them breathe). The ability to intubate a patient and provide an airway is one of the most important skills that I need to master as an emergency physician because that is often the first thing that must be dealt with in order to help someone that is critically ill.
We had our third ultrasound of the pregnancy to find out why Melissa was measuring weeks behind and by the grace of God the ultrasound was completely normal!! By ultrasound our baby is measuring about 31-32 weeks and that is just about where we should be based on dates (32 weeks and 4 days). When you measure Melissa’s belly she still measures several weeks behind but its is wonderful to know that the ultrasound shows that the baby is growing well. Right now our baby is 3 lbs 14 oz! We got to see our baby’s feet, hands and face to give us another preview of who will be joining us on February 19th, 2009. Thank you for all your prayers…we felt them when we got to the appointment because we knew that whatever we found out God was in control and orchestrating everything.