F Is For Friday

Four hours: The amount of time it took to drive from point A to point B yesterday. Both Mike and I had to travel for work this week so it was Grandma to the rescue! She traveled with me and took care of Ashton while I was working, and was a saint on the 4 hour car drive home. Ash was one very wiggly boy and was not at all thrilled about being in his car seat for so long. Thank goodness we're flying to Colorado next week - I don't foresee another long car ride in our future any time soon. We did stop at a shopping mall at the 3 hour mark where Ash found a gigantic t-shirt shop where he was able to chase grandma around all of the clothing racks. He was able to get a few wiggles out and tire himself out enough to cat nap the rest of the way home.

Fortunate: We have an appointment with Dr. Aronson on Tuesday to get Ash started on 9 months of preventive TB treatment. She is going to walk us through the process and do's and dont's while he's on the drug, which I should add is a special version of it that she found that doesn't cause as many side effects as other more commonly used brands. She has stayed in constant contact with us via email since we notified her of the postitive skin test, and has been nothing but reassuring and positive and informative and wonderful. We're lucky to have the best hands around taking care of us. I admit that I'm antsy to get him started on the treatment, because although it's currently latent TB I've read it can turn in to active TB without warning - I'm ready to flush this out of him.

FYI: Dr. Aronson said that it's very common for children adopted from Ethiopia to have come in contact with TB and often will test negative on a skin test because of being malnourished. Apparently the malnourishment interferes with a proper read. Even if the child's chest xray appears completely normal she recommends redoing the skin test at a later date just to make sure because (as was in our case) once the child is better nourished the skin test restult can change. It's also important to keep in mind that many doctors will say that testing positive on a skin test is a fluke if the chest xray doesn't show signs of TB, when in reality if the child is from a high exposure country such as Ethiopia this is most likely a sign of latent TB which should be treated. Bottom line, test and retest your child and don't believe a doctor who says that a clear chest xray is 100% green light.

Fotos: Due to a crazy work week and travel I don't have any. But, Grandma does and I'm sure she'll share soon so that I can post some pretty adorable pics of him being spoiled rotten...

Friday: 'Nough said.