Prayer Requests

I know I made a not-so-less than dramatic post last week about life being heavy.  If you have been praying for our family, thank you.  There were a lot of things up in the air at that point, so I just didn't feel like getting into it.  Now that we know some things, I am more than happy to share in the hopes that your prayers can be more bold and specific before the Lord, although we know he is fully aware of our needs and already knows every outcome.

On the lesser-important side of things, we went back on fertility meds in December.  After the miscarriage my OB wanted to try and see if my body would reset itself about a {short} pregnancy and go back to normal.  A lot of people apparently become fertile after pregnancy loss.  Whatever.  I didn't.  I respond well to the lowest dose to Clomid, so we decided to go down that road again.  It "worked", but no pregnancy.  After the holidays, after waking up Christmas morning not to children opening gifts and snuggles in Christmas jammies but knowing your baby is dead in a gutter somewhere because you "passed" her- after all of that we just couldn't take more bad news.  I have a hysterosalpingogram (hsg) test Thursday to see if I have any blockages.

We also found out over break that my sister-in-law, Rachel, has a growth in her brain.  If you don't know her, she had a brain tumor at age 5 (she is 22 now, so 17 years ago) and has been cancer free since they removed and treated for that.  Over break she was having tingling and numbness on her left side and an MRI found some sort of growth-either scar tissue or another tumor- close to the previous site.  She had a biopsy done last week to see what the growth was (there are different treatment paths depending on what they find it to be), but the pathology came back inconclusive and the Dr believes the biopsy didn't penetrate the growth, just pushed it.  Coming out of surgery, she has to have assistance walking with a belt now and will start physical therapy this week.  The doctors are going to wait 2 weeks to see what the growth does (grows, shrinks, stays the same) and then will decide on treatment then.

We are scared.  My mom is a nurse, so I grew up having good faith in doctors and health care. I know that there are few "for sures" and lots of "we will have to sees", but that good people are working hard to help heal, Lord willing.  We have to wait a few more weeks now to see what's going on with Rachel, and it is terrifying to not being able to do something right away, but this I do know- the Lord will work all things for good for Rachel.  As much as we love her, He loves her more.  We don't know what this is or why she has to go through this again, but He does and he has it under control.

Please pray that Rachel would be healed, that she would regain her strength and be comforted.  Please pray for wisdom for Rachel's doctors, that they would be able to confidently diagnose her and treat her effectively with the least amount of side effects as possible.

I probably won't post much besides updates on Rachel-there are so many things that are hard to do as it is when you have so much on your mind and your heart is so heavy.  Thank you for praying- please spread the word to your loved ones!