Noah News

In December Noah got a new AFO (brace) and new shoes with his lift on them. What an ordeal getting his brace was though. At the beginning of the year we had started a new insurance, and of course the place where we usually got his brace made was out of network with our new insurance. So as we started looking for a new place we came to find out everyone around was out of network with our insurance, and it isn't like we have some uncommon insurance provider or anything. It's a pretty popular one, but we couldn't find anywhere that was considered in network that made AFO's for children so that we didn't have to pay full price for his new brace which would be at least $1000. Well, I won't get into the whole story of all that we went through to get his new brace, but eventually our insurance was able to find us a place that wasn't too far away that was in network that could make Noah's new AFO for us. They were fast too. We got it a week later, AND......our insurance covered it 100%(they normally cover 80% I believe). What a blessing that was at Christmas time! I thank God for working it all out so that our bill went from over $1000 to $0.

Posing with his new brace and making sure he gets his face in the picture too, and Anna had to get in on it as well.

New shoes with his lift on them

In other news on Noah, he went to a kidney specialist after having that kidney stone back in November. The tests came back that it was just a calcium stone, which is good. The doctor said it was probably from all the time he has spent immobilized because of his limb lengthening procedures. Being inactive and unable to weight bear on his leg can cause the bone to release excess calcium that the body doesn't know how to process which can then turn into a calcium stone. Over the past year he has had random occurrences of terrible pain and nausea. It started back right after his last limb lengthening surgery (December 2010) so we assumed it was caused by all the pain meds and anesthesia. He has had problems with the pain meds before, but the occurrences of pain kept happening so we started looking for other answers. One of them was that he was lactose intolerant because it did seem like a lot of the time the pain and upset stomach came on after he had had something dairy. We started giving him lactaid whenever he had dairy, and at first it seemed as if these episodes had gone away, but then he had another one, and I eventually started giving him dairy without lactaid and found that it didn't bother him a bit, so it was not that. All this time the extreme pain and nausea and eventually vomiting as well that he kept having randomly was probably caused by that kidney stone moving though his system. In fact, if you remember back in September 2010 I had a special prayer request for Noah because he had had rusty colored urine one day, and they were running a bunch of tests on him then. The tests all came back fine, and they didn't find anything on the kidney ultrasound either, but I did read online that blood in the urine of a child is a key tip off that it could be a kidney stone, so I'm not sure why all the tests came back fine, and I could be wrong about this, but it seems like that is probably when this kidney stone started. I do know though that the kidney stone has been there since at least April. That was when he had some leg pain during his limb lengthening, and he went to the ER, and they took some x-rays of his leg at that time. Well, when he went to the same ER for his kidney stone they were able to look back at those x-rays on his leg and could also see his kidneys in them, and the stone was right there. It's just that at that time no one was looking at his kidneys in the x-ray, they were looking at his leg. Now that we know what this pain is from though if he has it again we'll know to have him checked for kidney stones. He goes back to the specialist next month, and he will do a kidney ultrasound to see if he has any more. We are thinking he might because he has had some random pain again. It's not nearly as bad though and goes away rather quickly, but it still may be the start of another kidney stone.