Adoption Update: Hospitalization

It has been a busy few days. Claire was admitted to the hospital two days ago. She is having a lot of difficulty breathing and her oxygen saturation is low. She is doing better but still not well enough to come "home." They are giving her steroids and two additional breathing medications. They do not have the right equipment to give Claire oxygen so they have told us that they are worried about that. There has been one doctor and one nurse that have spoken English so thankfully on the second day we were finally able to understand what was happening! She is about 30-40 minutes away from where we are staying as it is the nearest hospital that admits children.

The hospital is nothing like we are used to and we are about three and a half hours south of the main city here in Poland so it is quite a small hospital. There are no monitors, everything is done with paper charts, there are 3-5 beds per room, they "sterilized" Claire's arm for her IV with a wet paper towel, the breathing treatments are done in one room with lots of breathing "stations" (and I'm sure germs!!!), nothing seems clean, and after three days we still have not seen a single square of toilet paper anywhere (ya, we know .... yuck!!!!). But the staff has been very gracious and has done their best to take good care of us, we imagine that they all want to see the silly American family ;)! And they all are very curious about Claire as well, we imagine it isn't often that they see children with Down syndrome and certainly not ones who haven't been swaddled in cribs or strapped in bouncer chairs their whole lives :(.

You can imagine how worried we have been having her struggle so much, being away from all of Claire's regular specialists, being in such a different environment without the confidence that she is getting the care that she needs, and then not being able to communicate with the doctors!  But God is good and she is getting better!!

There is no internet at the hospital so we haven't been able to keep in touch. I spent the first day/night with Claire and then Justin and I switched yesterday because we had a social worker visit for Amelia and we felt like it was very important for her to see that we were not choosing one sick girl over the other and Justin was feeling overwhelmed here with the other three since Amelia is also sick and has only really bonded with me so far. Last night was the first moment that I've ever not been with Claire when she was in the hospital, and not only that but I had NO way to check on her!!!  There was lots of worship music playing and scripture quoting going on here!  I showed the kids pictures of her but Anna was very upset and Levi had FOUR accidents last night :(. Today we will go to switch back but we can't visit as it would involve loading up all of the kids, taking all of the carseats into the hospital, and then re-loading them back into another taxi when we are ready to go, not to mention we worry about them catching something since there are so many sick children in the same space :-/.  So we will leave the kids (and carseats) in the taxi (I know, yikes!) and run in/send the other one out right back out quickly. What an adventure!

Amelia has been on antibiotics for 4 days now and her fever finally went away yesterday (after 6 days!). She actually seemed excited to see me when I got back yesterday and ate half a bowl of rice cereal (her first time eating any solid food since last Thursday) and drank 3 bottles! She isn't eating this morning but hopefully she will try again sometime today.

The social worker visit went well considering I made it to the apartment with only 30 minutes to go, the apartment was a mess, and the kids weren't dressed! I got everyone ready to go, the apartment tidy, and a plate of cookies set out just in time. Amelia fell asleep about 5 minutes into the visit again but the social worker said not to worry and that it must mean she is comfortable here. She asked questions about how Amelia is doing but actually seemed more interested in learning about Down syndrome and asked lots of general questions about Ds. We hope we made a big impact!

Please pray for Claire! This is hard in so many ways but we know that God is bigger than our circumstances. Thank you.