Golly… I’m getting worse and worse at posting on my blog. 🙃
Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much has happened since my last post in May of 2022. Here goes!
Not that it matters now, but the following blog segment I typed up back on 11/9 but so much was going on that I left it as a draft and didn’t get around to posting it; however it works out with today’s posting.
11/9/2022
I finally finished my Bachelor’s degree. It’s been a long, often rough road the last few years with many “I’m done” or “naa, I don’t need this” inner dialogues. Thankfully, encouragement and perseverance drove me to the finish line. It’s so nice to not “have to do homework” after a long day at work or just having some school deadline looming outside of work or home responsibilities. I think it took a solid 2 weeks of me thinking I had homework to do until it finally sunk in. Yay! I is smart now. 🤣
I realize in my last post I was going to announce the birth and gender of the baby. For those (few) who read this blog (only), it’s a boy and his name is Ezekiel (aka “Zeke”). Otherwise, most already know about him from other communications.
What I do want to update on is diagnosis and surgery.
This very week, Zeke had his surgery to fix his heart defect. I’m a little rusty on the numbers, but I believe way back earlier this year when we were introduced to this world, that about 40-60% of babies born with Down Syndrome (DS) — officially called Trisomy 21 — will likely have some kind of heart issue or defect. We were very fortunate and blessed to learn that although he did have a heart defect, that his was in the “lesser of two evils” category, so to speak. I won’t go into egregious detail as you can Google AV canal defect and find many medical journals and peer-reviewed articles on the subject matter, but suffice to say this image is a rudimentary overview:
Source: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/007324.htm
While not typical of every normal person (left) and every heart defect (right), the short version of what his surgery entailed was they had to insert the middle “wall” of his heart to separate the 4 chambers that have essentially been 2 chambers since birth. God is good and his surgery went well with no complications. His recovery is going well but has a little ways to go.
We were thankfully pre-prepared with Zeke’s diagnosis of Down Syndrome (again, not “Downs” Syndrome) a good bit of time before his birth so we could enjoy the long-awaited joy of his birth no matter the situation. In the initial few months, we had the looming awareness he’d need heart surgery but just not when or how severe it’d be (all covered above). As we fast-forward to now, he recovered very quickly and has pretty much gotten back to his normal self and advancing from there well. He was in and out of the hospital in a week, off oxygen in a month, and we’re praying he comes off of some other medicine in the next month or two. It’s crazy to believe we already have a 7.5 month old, encroaching on an 8-month old!
It’s always hard leaving a job you’ve been at for a long time, but it was necessary. I am thus very blessed in that I was able to recently accept a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (for me) to finally advance my career into the IT Networking field as a Network Administrator. I’m still baffled it’s a reality, but thank God (and the multitude of encouragement and nudges from work friends) for the opportunity. You can scan my older blog history to see this has been a dream job of mine and why I say a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — because the path to get here has been full of self-torture from high-expectation and failures to succeed in studying for this field for myself. Fortunately, I will be focusing on a niche aspect of Networking (phones) vs directly with routers and switches, but that is a cross-train opportunity I’m excited for.
Until next time,
Andrew
My Life. My Story. My World. 
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