Test Results

Whew, where do I start? We have had a lot of medical testing done here lately ... fun stuff!

Payton ... over the summer, I found a deer tick in her head when we were at the store ... you know, the really tiny deer ticks ... the ones that cause lyme's disease. Ugh. Instead of messing with it in the middle of the store, I wanted to wait until we got home. Well ... I forgot. And I remembered days later. I swear my mind is going. I ended up removing it, but I do believe the head broke off and with her fighting me, I couldn't get it out. I was told it would fall out on its own, but I sort of freaked out and told them I wanted to test her for lyme's disease. So we did ... finally. And the test was negative. Thank God!

Nika ... you might remember me mentioning all the bloodwork she has to have done. We have done three stool samples and two of three rounds of blood draws. One more to come. The stool samples showed no parasites and no giardia. Whew! Round one of bloodwork revealed that she is not immune to MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) or chicken pox, so she will need to be immunized for those. Hmpf.

Another test that we wanted to have done on Nika was an ultrasound of her abdomen. I don't think I have really talked about this yet, but her Russian medical record revealed that she had a history of calcification on her kidneys. It also said that she had diffused changes of the liver, reactive changes of the pancreas and an enlarged spleen. Oook then, that is sort of scary since that pretty much is every organ in the abdomen. So we hired an American Clinic in Russia to do an ultrasound on her belly. They reported that everything looked fine, but we wanted confirmation of that here in the U.S. using the medical technology that we have.

So today I took Nika for her ultrasound. She did fabulous, by the way ... it really is sort of sad how she is sort of trained, for lack of a better word, to sort of obey. Does that make sense? We are trying to let her know it is okay for her to sort of come out of that shell, but how do you really teach that? Anyway ... her ultrasound today showed that all of her organs look completely normal. Thank God again!