Answered prayers and updates

**UPDATE 9/19/08: The new nurse has to finish out her contract at Hospital Central so she won't be joinging us till the beginning of October which is a huge relief and an answered prayer as we are still dealing with Dionisio being sick and I just don't have the time or energy to be up at the BH in my down time training someone with my pathetic version of Portuguese at the moment**

I have some answered prayer requests:

• I started Dionisio playing with food yesterday….3 times before his bottle we played with banana baby food….it was all over both of us and he managed to maybe eat about 2 spoonfuls despite the fact that I never actually put the spoon into his mouth. Today we tried apples….and apparently he LOVES apples, because he let me put the spoon into his mouth and ate the ENTIRE jar!!! Praise God! When it came time for the milk, he wanted nothing to do with the bottle. This afternoon we tried peaches…apparently that is also not his thing, although he made some great faces. We managed to eat about 5 or so spoonfuls though and he still let me put the spoon into his mouth….we might be buying a whole bunch of apple baby food for the moment! Baby steps.

• We actually got a consult yesterday with a GI surgeon for today…until we found out it was the same surgeon that operated on another one of our kids in the BH…he did a horrible job repairing a huge hernia she had and made us come back so many times just so he could get the money. So we cancelled first thing this morning and our medical director for the clinic called the private pediatrics side of the hospital and asked if we could have an urgent appt with a pediatrician she heard was amazing. She was not working today, so we asked how much we could pay to get her to come in…about 50 US dollars later and we had a deal (we have a socialist medicine system here so most everything is free or nominal charge but it takes forever, the care is bad, and you never see the same person twice….but you can see the same mds on the private side by paying them….then it’s your time you bought…the place is cleaner, people smile more, they are nicer to you and suddenly they actually care about you…interesting what money does huh?) anyway, she was amazing and really knew her stuff for a Mozambican md. I was quite impressed. She actually gave us her cell number and told us she wants us to see a pulmonologist on Monday and we aren’t to pay! She works on the hospital side in pediatrics on Mondays, so she said to come, call her and then she’ll call the pulmonologist and we’ll have an on the spot appt. She agrees that the frequent infections, skin infections, and cough could all just be allergies. So we are upping our dose of Claritan, changing to soy milk, and waiting to talk to the pulmonologist on Monday when we will set up an allergy skin prick test. If anything, we know have a great contact for a pediatrician for the future. And we are up to 8kgs now….yeah! Ok, but that’s cause we are force gavage feeding him milk through the tube…but I’ll take ANY and ALL weight gain from him. We are totally trusting the Lord’s provision and timing for Dionisio. He is His anyway, and I know that He has plans for him. We just have to be patient!

• We have a brand new Mozambican nurse starting on Friday. She’ll be working Monday thru Saturdays 7:30am to 1pm which means sometime, a long time from now, I’ll actually be able to sleep in! For now, it will be A LOT of work as they don’t do much of anything in the hospital and so we get to train her…I mean…I get to train her. She only speaks Portuguese so this should be interesting. It also means I’m going to work a lot harder because not only am I feeding Dionisio during the day all day and taking him at least half the nights during the week to feed every 4 hours, and caring for the baby house kids, and doing all my medication shifts, but I now have to take the time to attempt to explain everything to her in a foreign language as well as be in the BH for her hours so that I can make sure she knows what she’s doing/is trustworthy around all our precious medical equipment and medicines we keep stored in the nursing office! Did I mention that one of our other western nurses just left yesterday to get married and won’t be back for 3 months…..so we’re short handed as well!

Ok, prayers for my energy, patience, wisdom, and direction in training this new nurse as well as caring for Dionisio!