Day 25 - Beginning Week 4

Yes, this is actually the start of Amelia's 4th week at Kartini Clinic.  It seems like so much less time and so much more.  In that time, she has been on a food pump the whole time, taking 111 bottles of Boost Plus or Pediasure during 10 hours of sleep at night.  That is a total of 27,750 ml of formula through the feeding tube since we have been here.  I am not sure how much more, but for the foreseeable future, we are still on this.

 The up side is after Saturday, we haven't had any outright refusal to eat.  We have had some complaining about what she is eating, and not a LOT of eating, but she HAS been eating.  This is good.  This is very good.  It feels like actual progress.

Some of the hurdles we are currently facing are:

1. The clinic maintains a staff to patient ratio during meal time, and they don't have enough staff for Amelia to have breakfast in the mornings with the other kids right now due to upsetting that staff to patient ratio.  This is troublesome because we (Katherine) really doesn't have the time or ability in the morning to get Amelia up, get down to the kitchen and make her breakfast and get her to clinic without Amelia being exhausted the whole day.  We could use prayer for a good, quick resolution to this.

2. Insurance denied the majority of the authorized claims.  It wasn't because they won't or don't cover it, in fact, I received letters from the insurance stating that they had authorized the treatments.  It was because the actual billings they received was missing a code that they wanted it to have....  Emily at the business office assures me this is an unfortunately all too normal occurrence, and that she will just have to contact them and see what it is they want on there and then re-bill them.  Pray for swift, and successful re-billing to the insurance.

3. Our patience with Amelia when she is whining and complaining about the food we have, or the food that she WANTS vs. what she is actually getting...  It is a lot sometimes, and hopefully as she starts eating more, this will go away.  Right now, we just need the patience to bear with it for the time being.  Prayers for patience are always appreciated.

To end on a good note, we had Pile of Puppies today, and Amelia got to go in a pen with 2 other girls, 3 of the Portland Blazers, and 5 young French Bulldog puppies.  They were pretty cute little dogs.  I would have much preferred a HUGE litter of Labradors or golden retrievers, or something big and fluffy like Bernese Mountain Dogs or Newfoundlands. We got French Bulldogs which weren't too bad.  Amelia had a good time, though one of the other girls kind of hogged a lot of the puppies attention.  Amelia still got to hold and pet a number of the puppies and seemed to really enjoy it.  Here are a few of the pictures to end with of Amelia's fun day.