Hope for a Homecoming

Hi everyone. It has been a long and complicated time since our last blog. We would like to thank all of our friends for their prayers and faith for our family and the situation with David.

David, looking much better these days.

Last time I wrote in this blog the good news that David was home from the hospital. Unfortunately he did not stay home for long. David went back to the hospital in February and has been in one of three different hospitals ever since. All of that time, until two weeks ago he was in pediatric ICU’s. David has collapsed lungs, a hole in his heart, and he currently must breathe through a tube in his neck. He is still too small for the heart surgery he requires.

This has been especially difficult because the hospital system here requires family members to do some or most of the nursing for the patient. Because the hospital is so far away (one hour, one and a half hours, or three hours; depending on which hospital) has meant that Anchalee has been away from home for most of the last 6 months. It has been quite an undertaking for us to make sure our four other children (all under the age of four) were happy, as well as handling all the details of the farm, village, and church life.

Anchalee and David are both happy that since he has been released from the ICU,
 she is now able to hold David

This week we have some confidence that David will be coming home soon. They are currently training Anchalee to do the suctioning of the lungs and the application of medicines through the feeding tubes and assorted other things. So maybe even this week they will release David to come home.

Please pray for David to get past his recent fevers and for his healing to accelerate so that the doctors will release him to our care. It would be such a blessing to have our family back together again. Also because I will be returning soon to Canada for a month, it would be a great comfort to me personally if my wife was home with my kids. The trip to Canada has been postponed continually and can no longer be avoided.

Once again, thank you for your thoughts and prayers. The rest of us are well and we have made progress in many areas despite the situation. I would say more, but I want to share our news in person when I arrive in Canada.

God bless you all

David is Back Home

It is good to be home

The Glowing Hearts family would like to thank all of our friends for their prayers.  The day after I made the last blog entry, David was cleared to come home. We are very grateful to have our family back together again and Anchalee is especially happy to be sleeping in a bed once more and eating home cooked meals.

David’s lungs are good enough that they let him go home, but he is not out of the woods yet. They sent him home with a cooler full of medicine that has a complicated schedule, and he needs to take this stuff for a month. At that point they will have another look at him and determine when to schedule the heart surgery. If you would like to pray, it would be good if his heart was healed without the need for surgery.

We will now attempt to bring our own lives back to some kind of routine. The holiday season skipped us by because we wanted to be together for that, but through some miscommunication the kids already got their presents, so we will probably just have a festive meal and throw in a few birthdays for good measure (Gideon and I share a birthday). Getting David back was the present we were all hoping for anyhow.

Thank you once again, Happy New Year and may it be the best one you ever had.

Kim, Anchalee, Jessica, Genesis, Gideon, Shiloh, and David

A New Year Begins

David 

Happy New Year - to all our friends, from Anchalee, all the kids and myself. 2012 was a good year and we have had many things to be grateful for. We have a good house, and we are making progress with our agricultural projects that will help us become self-supporting. And most of all we have a good family network here that has enabled us to have the kids well attended at all times. Thank you to everyone who prayed for and supported us in 2012. Thank you to everyone who responded to our November newsletter that listed our projects and needs for 2013. May all your good works be returned to you in Grace. We will now be able to purchase some of the items we mentioned.

In October we brought home a new boy we named David. We think he was about 3 weeks old at the time and premature (about 2.2kg). He had been abandoned and left to die in the jungle, but he was saved by a caring neighbor and taken to a pastor friend who then contacted us.

David was so weak form his hard beginning that we did not realize that he had other medical issues. We brought him to the hospital in November because of his difficulty breathing. At that point we learned that he had Pneumonia and a collapsed lung. He was then brought to a larger hospital where it was determined that he also had a heart condition. He has a hole between his left and right ventricles which causes the blood to be pumped inefficiently and forces his heart to work much harder.

David has been in the hospital ever since. And because Thailand’s government hospitals do not provide full care like western hospitals; someone has had to be by his side the entire time to give him oxygen, medicine, milk, and provide basic care while he recovers. Anchalee has done 90% of this care, and for this reason she has become my biggest hero, even more so than before. She sleeps on a cement bench on a balcony just outside the room and has to cope with, up to 30, very sick children crying on a continual basis. It is a sad place to be at, but she has continued to be positive and helpful; being there for the other moms who are also facing dire situations. You can see that the other moms look up to her, and there is a family atmosphere in the section around David’s bed.

David is going to need open heart surgery to fix the hole in his heart, but the doctors are waiting for him to get a little older so that he will be better able to undergo the procedure. He could come home with us, except that he still has pneumonia and they won’t let him come home until that is cleared up. The good news is that today they have taken him off oxygen, which is a good sign, and they will test to see if he can be off oxygen entirely.

David smiled at Anchalee today - for the first time. He has come so far in the last few weeks. Please pray that his lungs will fully recover, so we can work towards fixing up that leaky heart too. 

To our friends we say, shine on you crazy diamonds!