He has What? Of What?

When we met Brayden, he was sick. The conversation started with "We are very sorry to tell you . . ." He was very tiny, very weak, and very pitiful. It turns out the Brayden had an e-coli infection. We went to the dr with him on a Saturday morning, and the dr told us that he heard a heart murmur and that he wanted Brayden to see a cardiologist "just in case". I guess that I was so glad to hear the good news -- Bray was responding to the meds for the e-coli and we could keep him with us for the remainder of our trip -- that the whole heart issue just didn't sink in. Brayden had an appointment at UNICAR on Dec 1, two days after we returned home.

Around noon on Dec 2, I got a call from our agency. They didn't have much information to give, just that Brayden had a congenital heart defect, that he would need surgery by the time he was 6 months old, and there was a surgeon in Guatemala who could do it. Talk about a ton of bricks!! A million things started running through my head, but the one thing that was terrifying me the most was the 6 months old part. Brayden was already 3 months old and our adoption had been moving at a snails pace. I just kept thinking that there was no way he would make it home in time and there was no way that I wanted him to have open heart surgery in a third world country! (Now we know that there is an amazing surgeon there, but I just couldn't grasp that at the time.)

Finally later that day I got an e-mail giving me the name of the condition, "Estos son los nombres de lo que tiene Mynor Elias
Cardiopatía Congénita: Congenital Cardiopathy
Tetralogía de Fallot: Tetralogy of Fallot". The internet has never been burned up so badly as it was that day as I tried to figure out what those words meant. I called a few drs and was very scared when their replies started with a depressing "Ohhhh".

For the next couple of months we prayed. We prayed for a miracle healing. We prayed for Brayden to make it home in time to have the surgery here. We prayed for us to figure out a way to go and stay if he had to have the surgery there. We prayed for guidance, for strength, and for sanity. There were so many things to consider and plan for -- how would we afford to pay for the surgery w/o any insurance, how could we leave our lives and stay in Guatemala during his recovery, how could we find blood donors for the surgery if we weren't a match (blood donation doesn't happen there like it does here, you basically have to find your own donors and pay them to do it), how could Brayden's foster mother take care of him after he left the hospital, how, how, how, how. . .

Then at the end of January, we found out that all of this stuff would be irrelevant. By the grace of God, our case had moved with great speed since December. On Jan 23 we found out that we were out of PGN, confirming that Brayden was coming home very soon and that there would be no surgery in Guatemala!!