Complete healing. Praise the Lord!

Last October, we went into Elsie’s surgeries with conflicting reports from doctors. The ones in Orlando, who knew her case the best, said surgery was the best option. The ones in Ohio advised us to keep her on medications and hope that surgery wasn’t necessary. When we were told about the potential developmental progress after surgery, because the brain is now able to make connections that it couldn’t before with abnormal activity, we decided to go forward with surgery.

Three brain surgeries during 20 days in the hospital is one tough road. But lately we have been seeing the developmental progress we had hoped for last year. Elsie learns new signs in about ten minutes and remembers them.  She now has about 15 spoken words. Our current favorite is “huggy” (so we hug her) followed by “aww”. Her attention span is definitely increasing. She still puts lots of things in her mouth, but she often uses toys as they are intended to be used. She used to just mouth them and throw them. She is learning and developmentally growing rapidly lately. Her therapists see it. “Elsie did such great work today,” they say. Her grandma sees it. “I can’t believe all the progress she’s made since I saw her last May.” And we see it, and we're so grateful.

Emma helps Elsie eat her banana. "Nana" is one of Elsie's words, and she continues to impress us as she learns to eat with a fork and spoon.

She's still always on the go! This is how most of my pictures turn out.

Even though we're seeing this developmental progress, we still didn’t know if the surgeries were truly successful. We haven’t seen any random seizures, which is wonderful. But this summer we saw three seizures when she had high fevers. The first one really scared me. I called the doctors in Orlando at midnight and they reassured me that because she had a high fever, it’s okay. Those seizures are different than epileptic seizures.

Yesterday we got very good news. The EEG Elsie had about ten days ago shows no abnormal activity. Her brain waves are normal, which means new connections are being made. We knew we were seeing the results of that, but it sure is nice to hear that the doctor's technical findings confirm that. Elsie’s surgeries a year ago were truly successful and we made a good choice.

I was baking cookies in the afternoon for the students coming over last night when I got the phone call. I stopped, jumped up and down, couldn't stop saying “thank you, Jesus” and even started crying. I am one thankful momma!