So here I am in the hospital on Easter weekend. I should be very happy that Kyle was finally here with us but I was not feeling good and they couldn't get my blood pressure to go down. They said i couldn't leave the hospital until it was stabilized. I missed Ellie and Andrew a lot!!! After all, they were still babies too and needed mommy. The worse part is Kyle was now at a different hospital and I couldn't even see him. I felt so alone and depressed. Not to mention the hospital staff was horrible. I had to practically beg them to bring me stuff. My other two were born at Scottsdale North hospital and the experiance was awesome! I wish I had that same experiance at Good Sam. Randy and my mom were at home with the other kids trying to keep nap schedules as usual and get ready for Easter. They all came to see me on Easter morning after church. Wow! Ellie and Andrew looked so big!! It was weird, just the other day Andrew seemed so little. He still wasn't walking. He crawled around the hospital room and got into everything! Not a good place for a 3 year old and 1 year old. Randy and my mom got to go see Kyle at PCH. I was happy at least someone got to hold him...I just wish it was me. So now they finally let me go because Kyle was going to have surgery and I wanted to be there with him so bad. He was in the NICU at Phoenix Childrens. We had to be sanitized to go through there and see him. He was in a little incubator to stay warm. He was sooo cute! After meeting all his nurses, I knew he was in the best care possible. His neurosurgeon, Dr. David Shaffron, was one of the best pediatric neurosurgeons in the country. I knew if anyone could help our baby it was him. Pastor Ted came down to meet us and stay with us during the surgery. Randy and I had been in a life team/bible study with about 10 other couples for quite some time now and it so happened that Kyle's surgery was during the night that we were supposed to be there. It's an amazing group of people that we call doing life together. We can all talk to each other about problems we are having and what not. Obviously they knew all to well about Kyle's journey. After the surgey Ted got on his cell phone and called over at The Patterson's house to give the group the good news that the surgery went great. He put them on speaker to let us hear them clapping and screaming!! It was great! I couldn't wait for them to wheel Kyle out so we could see him. Poor guy...his little head was all bandaged up and they had to shave his hair off for surgery. Yes, he had hair. He has Lombardino in him! My kids all had lots of hair. He had to stay in the NICU to be monitored for a while so we knew he wouldn't be going home with us. It was so hard to leave him there but on the other hand, I wanted to see my other kids. They didn't know why mommy and daddy were always gone with the new baby. Meanwhile, I was having excruciating back pain! I felt sick a lot and was in so much pain that Randy had to carry me up and down the stairs. I had never had a c-section but don't remember anyone saying that they felt this bad. I knew I had to suck it up because Kyle still wasn't home with us yet and I needed to go back and forth to the hospital each day to be with him. A week later Dr. Shaffron told us that after Kyle's surgery that he developed hydrocephalus. That means he would undergo another surgery to put a shunt in his head. we all have spinal fluid that drains naturally from our head and we urinate it out. If we didn't ( like Kyle ) our spinal fluid would build up in our head and our head would swell up or expand and eventually burst. What the shunt does is act like an irrigation pump. When the fluid builds up, the shunt opens to allow the spinal fluid to drain into a tube they put in him that goes from the shunt, down his neck and empties into his belly where he can then urinate it out. So now our little guy has undergone 2 major brain surgeries and needs to be monitered some more. Just when we think we get to bring him home, once again, another surgery. This time his shunt got clogged and they have to go in and fix it. I wonder on a daily basis what all this is for?? Why is this happening? Our we strong enough to handle all this? Kyle is a trooper! He pulls through once again. I want to just bring him home and keep him safe. NO MORE HOSPITALS!!! The no sleep and stress and depression is really wearing on me. I'm in more pain than ever! I feel like I should be felling better, not worse, each day. Everyone keeps telling me that it's my c-section and all the stress I am under. Maybe they're right. I keep truckin' because I want to get to a "normal" way of life for my family. The day after we got to bring Kyle home it was time for Gma Sandi to go back to Kansas City. My mom had been here for 4 weeks already. She was worn out. I drove her to the airport with all the kids in tow. Ellie cried the whole way there. She wanted Gma to put her in her suitcase. We were all crying when Gma left. That was a horrible ride back home. Grandma Valerie and Grandpa Gene came next. They came for a week to help with the kids since I had a c-section and Randy had to now go back to work. As the week went on, I was still in tremendous pain. I made an appointment with my obgyn to see if there was anything unusual going on with me. When I got there he performed and exam and said everything looked normal. He gave me some pain pills and told me to try and take it easy..."Right!!!". He also asked me to give a urine sample. I couldn't go though. He said drink some water and sit for a few minutes and try again. The minute I drank water I threw up. Immediately!! It was like it wouldn't even go down my throat b/c there was no room. It was really weird. He gave me a cup and told me to urinate at home. I started thinking..."I don't think I have gone to the bathroom in a few days". Huh, that weird I thought. I threw up 4 more times on the way home and didn't stop for 2 days. On that friday, i asked my father in law to take me to the hospital. I was in so much pain I couldn't take it another minute!!!! I just wanted to be knocked out cold. Once I arrived the took my blood pressure and it was 190/150. They immediately wheeled me up to cardiac. They thought I was having a stroke but didn't know why. They tried to give me a catheter but failed...I was too dehydrated and it wouldn't go in. I was on morphine and they were running all kinds of CT scans and so on. Honestly, I lot of it is a blurr. Finally my husband got there from work and a doctor came in and said " you need to go on dialysis immediately". I didn't even know what that was. He said "you are in complete renal failure, you have no working kidneys. Had you not come in to the hospital you would be dead in a day or two." What??? " I screamed, am I going to die?" They just said we are going to try and get you better. My husband was holding my hand and looked as if he were going to pass out. They wanted to do surgery right away and put stints in my kidneys to drain them.