This is the Baggett bunch Friday 12/8/06 at the Heart Transplant Christmas Party for the Children's Hospital of Michigan. This is an annual event where all the families get together and have fun and get to know each other better. I met Andri Hill's dad Brian for the first time. He took this picture and e-mailed it to me. You can read more about Andri at their CaringBridge site here (password is believeinmiracles)...
www.caringbridge.org/visit/alexandriahill

The boys had a blast. The party was a little different this year as Sarah McPharlin (teenage heart transplant recipient) brought a couple dozen teenage volunteers to play with the kids and help them with their crafts. Check out Sarah's web-site...
http://www.mcpharlin.net/

If you look closely at this picture you'll see a big deck of Uno cards in front of me. That's what the boys seemed to enjoy most. Also notice I am wearing my Arkansas transplant team polo given to me by our donor family the Loomis' this summer in Louisville at the Transplant Games. The boys got some stuffed "pals" (as they call them) from Santa and got to tell him what they wanted for Christmas.

The bad news is Monday morning Samuel woke up very sick. We are in the middle of introducing a new immune suppressant drug called CellCept to replace his Imuran. Cellcept is a drug that is measurable in blood draws whereas Imuran isn't. My mom came over to stay with him and I went in to work for a while, I got him an appointment with his pediatrician, Dr. Bloomer, for 3 pm. She couldn't find any reason for his headache, ear ache, low grade fever and general blahs so we talked it over and decided it was best to take him to Children's so they could take a look at his heart and make sure everything was O.K. there. If we hadn't started that new drug so recently we probably would have waited it out at home for a while. Well they decided to admit him and run a battery of tests (blood cultures and all that). They put him on I.V. anti-biotics (after they failed to get the I.V. in a couple times). By Tuesday he was doing quite a bit better and we were all pretty confident there was nothing major wrong. They wanted his cultures to go 48 hours before they ruled out a bacterial infection, but they released him Wednesday (yesterday) around 11:30. They said if something came back positive after that they'd call us back in. Samuel's least favorite part (even worse than getting poked) is the pulling off of the tape. That is such a painful thing for him.

So today he is back at school and our lives are getting back to "normal".

For those of you that knew, thank you for your prayers. God is Good - All the Time <><