Life with Jimmy: It's Been A While!

Life with Jimmy: It's Been A While!: I'm bound and determined to start blogging regularly!  2016 was a crazy year for our family.  After Jimmy rode the rocking horse down th...

Brain Surgery

His surgery was 7 hours long!  We were given a private waiting room because they knew it would be long and they didn't want us seeing other families coming and going.  We were given hourly updates, which helped!  He ended up with 4 plates in his head, which we did not know until months later when I could feel tiny bumps in the front of his head and had xrays done (it was bone remodeling).

He slept a lot the first couple of days after surgery, and only complained about pain the first day.  We were in the hospital for a total of 5 days, it would have been four days, but he had to poop before they would release him!  After the first day after surgery all he wanted to do was go home!

 I felt that in order to help with his healing, he needed to eat and his ADHD medicine killed his appetite. At the time of his surgery he was almost 12 years old and only weighed 50 pounds, he was SO skinny! I asked the nurses not to start the medicine again and here we are over a year later and he's still not on any medicine.

So ready to leave to hospital!

His cat Juliette missed him a lot!

Hanging with his big sis Sydney!

He is currently having anger issues and meltdowns at school.  He's seeing a therapist for this, but we may have to find a medicine that will help with this.  I've had to go to school many times to pick him up because of his meltdowns.  His meltdowns are really starting to interfere with school.  Any recommendations on meds?  Ways to help with his meltdowns?  I would love to keep him off of meds, but it's starting to look like he needs it.  He's also having a lot of moments of confusion, such as getting on the wrong bus at school, instead of going to glass, wandering the halls at school, referring to men as women and women as men.  On the plus side, he now weighs 77 pounds!

It's Been A While!

I'm bound and determined to start blogging regularly!  2016 was a crazy year for our family.  After Jimmy rode the rocking horse down the stairs when he was 3 years old, they did an MRI at Children's Hospital Cincinnati.  They found a 3mm cyst/tumor on his brain. THEY NEVER TOLD US!  They did an MRI on him the next year after he nearly drowned and still did not mention it.  When Jimmy was 7 years old we were sent to Children's to have him tested for autism.  That is when the doctor told us about the cyst.  She wanted an MRI to see if it had grown.  At that time it had not grown and we were told they would just keep an eye on it.  This MRI shows when the cyst hit 10mm and they decided that it needed to be removed.  

Our original surgery date was February 3, 2016, a few weeks before they changed it to February 10th. Funny thing, at Children's Hospital, if it's not emergency surgery, they consider it elective surgery...you know, like a boob job!  That meant that we would not know the time of surgery until the morning of!  Thank goodness we had an early surgery, 7am.  It was a 7 hour surgery!  More about the surgery in my next post.