a bacterial journey

wow, so far 2012 has been a year of craziness!
maybe God is trying to prepare me to be able to handle life with a bambino? who knows! i'm kind of hoping to get a breather before the baby chaos begins though!

anyways, last week my husband gave us a little scare...which isn't a nice thing to do to a preggo lady who may already be a little extra hormonal...

this whole story began in december though. maybe a year before that actually, though we had no idea.

the week before christmas i made my husband go to our doctor because he had some painful swollen lymph nodes on his neck.

of course the doctor's office was crazy with people trying to get in their physicals and stuff before the end of the year, but our doctor was awesome, made it a priority to see us, and was really interested in what was going on with my husband.

he immediately had him do some tests and get a CT scan, and the results came back with a diagnosis of "suppurative lymphadenitis"...which our doctor found to be very interesting, and something that he had never seen in his 40 years of medical practice. he said though that the most common cause of that would be an infection, so he consulted with an infectious disease specialist, and put him on a 6 week dose of a tough general antibiotic.

the swelling an pain did seem to go down during that time, though he did still have some hardened lymph nodes. the doctor said at that point though that it could take awhile for those to fully go away, but he felt like there was a chance that whatever was causing the underlying infection had been killed out, though the best and least invasive way to find out would be to just pull him off the antibiotics and see if any of the symptoms came back.

he did pretty well for about a month, so we hoped for the best!

but then a couple of weeks ago i noticed my husband start to grab the side of his neck some. when i asked him if the knots were coming back, he would say no, that he just had slept funny. :P

anyways, his work sent him off on a last minute trip to canada, so i told him that if his neck wasn't feeling normal that i would make him go to the doctor when he got back.

however, when he got back from his trip, i wasn't expecting to see a huge lump on the side of his neck! it looked like a goiter or something!



we went back to the doctor again, who said this time a lymph node was abscessed, and we needed to see a surgeon to get it drained.

so off we went that day to the surgeon, who told us it would need more than drained...he wanted to try to remove it and biopsy it to make sure it wasn't lymphoma or something.

the idea of it possibly being cancer had us both pretty freaked out!

so we got him scheduled for surgery, and we were praying like crazy for a good report!

just after the operation, the surgeon came to me and said the site was completely full of puss and infection...which made him feel that the chances of it being lymphoma were slightly less. however, he was having biopsies done, and cultures done. he said that if it was a common staph infection or something then he would want to go back in after the infection cleared to do another operation, and make sure that the infection wasn't secondary to lymphoma. apparently an infection like staph can compromise the tissue from the biopsy.



we were seriously bummed that it might still take weeks, plus another operation, before we would be able to fully rule out the possibility of cancer.

but then the next day some good news came...or at least it was good to us!

the initial tests on the bacterial culture showed that it was something not too common in the US. the doctor told us at that point that he felt more comfortable ruling out lymphoma, and he didn't feel a secondary surgery would be necessary! thank God!

so instead he handed us over to an infection disease doctor. she's been amazing and thorough, and so we feel like we're in pretty good hands!

the final cultures on the bacteria will take about 6 weeks to grow in the lab, so until then they won't know the exact bacterial strain. but they know what family it's in, and they've started treatment on my husband that involves about 4 different antibiotics at the moment, but they will fine tune the treatment once they have more info on the exact bacterial culprit.

the estimated that it will take 6-12 months on meds before the bacteria is totally cleared from his system (it's from an aggressive bacterial family!), but they feel like once it's gone it will be gone for good...and hey, taking pills is definitely better than chemo! :)

they don't feel like it's anything that is contagious either since it's been internalized in his body. they're doing a few tests on me though just to be sure it's nothing i've picked up as well though since we've been exposed to a lot of the same things.

when we were in india a little more than a year ago, shomik got very sick, and was sick almost the whole time we were there. they suspect that this is something he picked up then while his immunity was down, and his body has just been fighting to subdue it ever since.

so anyways, we're so thankful to God that this is something that can be treated! we appreciate all the continued prayers though for a strong recovery, and for safety for me and our kiddo!

now we're hoping that our next major trip to the hospital will be for happy things...this week i hit the 3rd trimester, so we're ready to focus on happy things and new life! oh, and we still have SO much to do!

ps- our little pup mowgli is still having some issues...which of course had to take a back burner to the chaos of this past week, but we really need our whole house to be well now! send the prayers!