From Puerto Rico to Africa: Updates and hospital time

I'm going to get to Scott's time in Congo with Kai...the gotcha day pictures and his almost two weeks in country. But I wanted to post some recent updates first as the past four weeks since we brought Kai home has been a whirlwind!!! Some of you may know we relocated to South Jersey (which should be classified as a whole different state apart from northern New Jersey...and because somebody always asks..no it's not like the tv show, the Jersey Shore) for my hubby's new job as a civilian fire fighter working for the Coast Guard. We said adios to active duty military, hola to civilian world. It's pretty nice. We're feeling pretty free, but the transition for our family of six.... has. been. pure. ~~craziness~~ hell. We are staying in a temporary rental for a few weeks as we finalize our home purchase. All of the kids are out of whack. We left warm beautiful Puerto Rico..oh how I miss you..and we are freezing. And we are bored because we can't go outside because we are freezing. And poor Kai. Coming home from Congo, to Puerto Rico, to New Jersey. Yes he's freezing too and makes this cute little mad scrunched up face when the wind hits him. It will get better. We are taking it a day at a time and I couldn't make it here if I didn't have beautiful caring friends in our life who keep us entertained with toys and coffee so we're not sitting in our rental all day going nuts. You better believe I'm already planning our escape to Puerto Rico though.

Now to a more important topic then all of our chaos. Kai is doing fantastic! He's gained 4 lbs since he's came home and is such a ball of constant energy. I haven't posted this yet or these pictures. After Kai came home 6 days later we went to a check up at our family doctor for what we thought would just be a physical before our move to NJ where we would take him to the international adoption clinic at CHOP. The doctor did the normal check up and he wanted to run a couple of blood tests while we were in the office. Something didn't look right when the blood test came back and they asked to run it again. His hemoglobin was 3.5. The average persons hemoglobin is 12. Anything under 8 is considered dangerous. The doctor called for an ambulance and I rode with Kai to Centro Medico. If you ever are in Puerto Rico and need to go to the ER, don't go to this one. The doctors came in and asked background history. Which of course we knew nothing. We did know that Kai may be possible sickle cell. While he was at our agencys transition home he was administered to the hospital and had a blood transfusion for what we thought was for malaria. He did have a test done for sickle cell. One test came back positive. The second time the test came back negative. So it was a thought in the back of our minds for the past month that he could possibly have sickle cell anemia. The doctor felt that his spleen was very enlarged and she said it felt like it was sickling and they needed to do blood work right away.

Mama and Kai in the PICU room during second transfusion.

Two hours later the nurse came in for blood work. 12 hours later they moved Kai to PICU and he was confirmed he had sickle cell anemia and needed a blood transfusion. One blood transfusion Kai was starting to perk up. He was starting to laugh, and chat in his swahili/french/2 yr. old babble. Second blood transfusion....he tried to jump out of the crib. He was feeling so much better and sooo good! Four days later he was finally released from the PICU and now he is on daily meds to help manage what could turn into a "pain crisis." I'm going to commit a whole post to Sickle Cell Anemia in the next post because I want people to be informed and aware of what Sickle Cell anemia is. Even if you are curious or happen to know somebody who has it but you don't know anything about it. That was us a few weeks ago! I'm no expert, but we are learning as we go.