Hi everyone!!

I finally got to put the video up of Landon pointing!! YEA!! He's been getting better at pointing (reaching) and has started to do a few signs! He's been doing "please", "help", "all done" and we're working on "more". He's having a hard time with more cause he has to have both hands, and that right one isn't really doing what he wants it to. His nurse, Theresa, and I were speculating the other day about his right hand and we came to the conclusion that we aren't sure if he even realizes that he has a right hand or arm until we make him use it. When we make him use it, he looks at it like it's someone elses hand...it's weird. Penny and Chelli tell us that the more we have him work with it, the better he will get with it.

He's been giving kisses and hugs again...well his form of hugs (which is just laying his head in your lap for a few seconds). He blows kisses to people when they leave now, which he wasn't doing a week ago. He's progressed so much and we're so thankful to see all the things he can do everyday.

Now that we were given the ok to do pureed food with Landon he has really enjoyed tasting stuff again. He's getting better with swallowing all the food in his mouth since we have taught him how to smack his lips...I know...but it's the only way we can get him to get all of it in his mouth. One day we'll worry about manners...right now we don't really care. :) He's been drinking juice with a straw, but he gets tired of eating really quickly. I think his endurance will get longer the more we offer him food.

Penny has been really happy with the progress he's making with PT. She has been having him walk in the "Kid Walk" (which is the wheelchair contraption in the blog where we visit Penny below) and he is starting to propel it himself. She says he just needs to develop more strength in his hamstrings and walking is the only way to really do that. So, with a heavy sigh, we have still been killing our backs with helping him walk. :) He's not scissoring his legs like he was (which is something we were worried about) and he's doing a nice heel-to-toe action when he's walking. He's even walking with us just holding his hands!! He's still wobbly, but he's making progress!! We are just working on him catching himself while sitting so that we will be able to leave him without worrying that he'll hurt himself.

That's all we've got for right now. Chelli, the occupational therapist, has been out of town for the week so we haven't seen her since the swallow study. I think she'll be pretty happy with Landon's progress though. :) We see her on Friday after we visit with Penny again tomorrow. We'll keep you updated. :)

Love you all!!! XOXO

Happy Birthday to Landon!!!!

I can't believe that my little boy is already 2 years old!!! Where does time go? I think every 4th of July Braydon and I think about how 2 years ago we were sitting watching fireworks saying that we were going to have a baby the next day...it is definately a day of reflection to see how far we have come in a year. Last year Landon was one and could only crawl...and it's funny now to look back and see how big he is today. Yea, he can't walk anymore or crawl, but he could at one point and that's all that matters. It gives him more drive to get there again one day. :) We spent the night watching the fireworks from the hill we go on every year where we can see fireworks for miles. Landon loved them and wasn't scared by them at all...I kept telling him that they were all for his birthday. :)


As for his birthday, we didn't do much because of everything going on so we thought we would just spend the day relaxing with Landon at home. We sang happy birthday to him every chance we got and blew out the candles on his cake as a family. :) We opened some presents (although he probably would've just been happy with the gigantic bag that they came in). We got him his first Care Bear...that's what the yellow thing is in the picture below. :)





We received some cards in the mail, so we decided to take a picture with them to thank the people that sent them. :)


Landon has been doing really well over the past few days. He's become more interactive and expressive. He's been having fun giving us "five" and gets really excited over it. Last night we went on a walk and decided to let Landon decide where he wanted to go. He would hold his hand out like he was trying to point, but it was more like reaching. Braydon is going to try and get the video we took of him and put it up so everyone can see. I'll keep bugging him for it. ;) He's also been doing better with cruising along the table and coordinating his feet with his hands. His right hand is still not up to speed with his left, but the OT, Chelli, keeps telling us to work with it and it will eventually start to catch up. Walking is still hard cause he isn't holding his body weight very much, so we're having to hold him up and it's not very comfortable on our backs...but, it's all he seems happy doing. You can tell that he is the same kid inside, he's just frustrated cause he can't do the same things as he did before. I wish I could snap my fingers and change that for him, and I sometimes have dreams that that would happen but good things don't come without a little hard work, right??

Today we visited Chelli to do another swallow study to make sure Landon hadn't lost the ability to swallow food or drinks. Everything went really well and Landon didn't choke on any of the things we gave him. Chelli said that it took him a little while to move things to the back of his tongue, but when he got it back there, he swallowed it nicely. With that said, she gave us the go ahead to start giving him pureed foods again!! She said with a little practice with swallowing and with some exercises with spoons to move his tongue around, he will get better with it and we will be able to move up from there. Needless to say, after we left the hospital I went to the grocery store and got some things to try out...I think I was more excited than he was! :)

Tomorrow we visit Penny for PT, so I'll let you know if anything exciting happens. :)

A little note about our busy week

Hi everyone!!

Just wanted to write a little note and let everyone know how well Landon is doing. We've had a long week of therapy so far and it's only Wednesday! We saw Penny on Monday and Tuesday (as Braydon showed in the video below) where we worked on walking and cruising along on a flat surface. Landon isn't really doing it by himself, but we're showing him the motions of how to do them and he will eventually pick up the movements himself. It will just be a lot of reminding him how to do things.

Even though he can't walk himself, he gets aggravated that he can't and whines until we help him get to different places or get what he wants. He's very good at letting us know when he isn't happy. :)

We went to see Chelli today (Landon's occupational therapist). She worked with him on grabbing things and dropping them into containers and also on putting large pegs onto a board. He did well with both, but got pretty tired toward the end. She was impressed with the way Landon was moving his right hand and arm. He's getting better about opening and closing his hand and moving his arm around. She did say that she was kind of concerned about his right hand being in a fist when it's in a relaxed state. She wanted to see him being able to open it more, so she gave us a band that wraps around his wrist and has a piece that sticks up to wrap around his thumb to hold it back. Pulling his thumb back slightly helps tell his body to open his hand. We're supposed to have him wear it for an hour or two and then take if off for a little while. Hopefully he will get to where he doesn't need it and his hand will relax more without it on.

As Chelli was working with Landon, I was talking to a speech therapist about Landon in hopes of overlapping the sessions so both of them will be working with him at the same time. That way Landon won't be going from one therapy to the next for hours on end. We should be getting started with her sometime next week. She will be helping him to find ways to communicate with us when we get past the whining stage. We'll probably be working on getting the sign language back and then move from there. All of the therapists tell us to just keep showing him the things that he did before so that his brain can find a way to make a connection. The speech therapist told me that the way she puts it to parents is that his brain is made up of files, and before he was able to find those files quickly, but now all the files are mixed up and so his brain has to have the extra time to try and find the files again. I thought that was a good way to put it. So his brain still has everything there, he just needs more time to get them organized again.

So that's where we are as of today...tomorrow we have a day off to do something fun. I think we might try and have a picnic tomorrow. The weather has been beautiful, and Landon will probably appreciate the outside time. :) Friday we are back to OT before the July 4th weekend...I can't believe Landon will be 2 on Sunday!!!!! Where does time go?!?!

Also, I wanted to throw out there for everyone to keep my grandfather (Landon's great-Grandpop) in your thoughts and prayers. He had to have surgery on Monday to remove an aneurism after a month of waiting for his kidney function to level out. He had a hard time on the operating table, but after a 7 or 8 hour surgery is doing well. He just has a long road to recovery. I just wanted to ask everyone to keep him in your thoughts and prayers for a speedy recovery. Whatever everyone is doing for Landon is working so I wanted to share some of it with him. :)

Love you all and will keep updating. Have a wonderful July 4th if I don't send another update before then!!!!

I like to walk at PT!

I just wanted to let everyone know that PT is going very well and things are looking up. Penny, our PT, has told us to focus on standing and cruising. Landon just loves the fact that he can walk around again. He is a total maniac outside, its a great thing to see. I hope you all enjoy the video. More to come! (Sorry for the horrible quality on the video, its from our cell phones :/ )

Going to see Penny...

Hello all!!!

Hope everyone had a great day. We've been very busy today with going to see Penny the physical therapist. Landon was feeling kind of crummy this morning, so he was really irritable going to "work out" with Penny. :) He got over his little crumminess as the day went on.

When we went to see Penny she had Landon work on kneeling at a bench to play with some toys. He preferred to play like that before his episode, and he seemed very happy being back in that position. He played for a little while until Penny started making him stand up and sit down....he didn't like that very much.

Penny had Landon standing in a little contraption that looked like a wheelchair. It was supposed to help him get the movement of walking without having to worry about holding his other extremities up. He was strapped into this chair that held his body up and let his feet dangle. He cried the whole time he was in it, but as he got moving his cry changed from hysterical crying to "i'm only crying because i want to remind myself that i was upset". We didn't torture him too long though...he got out and was quickly side-tracked to something else. Overall he did really well today and Penny said that he is still making small changes...which is good. We definately need to keep the changes coming. :)

I've included a couple of pictures from the past couple of days. The one on top is Landon playing in his highchair today with "Mack" from the movie Cars. He obviously loves it. When we asked him if he wanted to watch Cars today, Landon immediately looked up and stared at me as if to say, "heck yea"! It was super cute. The bottom one is of Landon with his Aunt Heather and cousin Logan. They have been here visiting with us this week.

We are home and lots of other updates!

In the Denver Aquarium Landon is trying to decide which ocean to destroy....I hope everyone got to spend some quality time in the Pacific!

Wow it has been a long time since we have updated Landon's blog and I'm sure everyone is dying for some updates. Dawn is taking a small break from updating the blog and I told her I would write some updates for everyone.

So for those of you who were following Dawn's last post, we found out that Landon was not suffering from any sort of drug withdrawals (unfortunately). As they started to take all the drugs off, Landon started to become more and more upset and more and more unconsoleable. He spent the first few days off drugs being exhausted but only managing to sleep for 2-3 minutes at a time. Whenever he would get angry, his entire body would become stiff and he was unable to move.

The doctors took note of the posturing and the worry from Dawn and I and they ordered an MRI for the next day. Dawn and I were so filled with anxiety when he had to go down for his MRI because they wanted to put him under again. I couldn't allow myself to sign the consent for that and would only allow them to sedate him. Dawn and I did our best not to go crazy for the next seemingly year long thirty minutes. Then we got a call from our nurses that Landon did great and he was on his way back up to the PICU...*WHEW*

We did our best to console Landon and tried a myriad of different drugs to try to get him comfortable without much luck. He was inconsolable all night. He wanted nothing more than to be held, but any time you touched him he would get upset and become super stiff making it almost impossible to even hold him. It made for some very tough nights, physically and emotionally for both Dawn and I.

The next morning, I left to go back to the hotel to shower and got a text from Dawn that I needed to get back to the hospital ASAP. Immediately my heart sank and I quickly called Dawn. Dawn's voice was definately saddened and she informed me that Landon's MRI showed that he had suffered brain damage from the arrest. I raced back to the hospital and when I got there I took all the news pretty hard. Dawn did her best to be strong and we went through a few days where we really needed each other's strength.

The neurologist came in to talk to us and let us know all the findings. They categorized Landon's brain damage as moderate to severe and let us know that it is difficult to really see how far a person can recover from a brain injury. From what we later learned, people can all have different results to the same injury to the same area of the brain. So now we have to play the waiting game and its up to Landon to fight his way back to us.

And fight he did. Landon began to slowly recover, showing a little less tightening each day but he was still super sensitive to touch, making him scream and cry. He would eventually fall asleep in your arms for hours. We expressed to our doctors in Colorado that we were ready to go home and were confident that we would be able to take care of him. All of our nurses and doctors were amazing, but we were so drained from living in a hospital that we knew it was time to go home.

On the night of June 4th, my mom came out to Colorado to help us on our long trip home. And the next afternoon we left for Nebraska. It was a very difficult trip as Landon was still very difficult to console, and it pulled at our heart strings to see him so upset when we couldn't really do anything for him. I truely owe that trip to my mother. We drove straight home, except for a few leg stretches and little boy diaper changes, from 4pm to 2am. Battling through a strong midwestern storm, but nothing was going to stop us from getting to our little house on Offutt AFB. I bet that same trip would've taken us 2 days if it was just me and Dawn. From the bottom of our hearts....THANK YOU BONNIE!!!! Thank you for helping us get our little man home safe and sound.

When we finally got home, we started to relax and called Landon's pediatrician to get all his physical therapy, occupational therapy, and any other therapies that would expedite his recovery, all lined up. Then we set him up with some movies and just let him relax. We were lucky enough to get to see our physical therapist just a few days after getting home (Thank you Carol for all the insurance magic!).

Penny (our PT) was obviously shaken up after seeing him. She had helped Landon learn to crawl and walk, so she knew how he was before all of this happened. Landon was so agitated that all she could do at that session was turn out the lights and just let him lay by himself. Finally, after an hour of crying, he calmed down enough to allow her to stretch out his muscles a little bit. She was very, very worried about him and the patterns that his limbs were moving in. Penny told us to just let him relax. Do whatever made him comfy and just let him be. She was going to contact Dr. LaCroix (Landon's pediatrician) the next day. For four days straight, thats what we did.....

And for those four days Landon began to improve and improve and improve. We all began to joke with each other when we woke up each morning saying, "What new thing is he doing today?" to which someone would reply "He's moving his arm!" or "He's rolling around!". Slowly... slowly things started to look up.

Our spirits all took a drastic turn one night when we took Landon out for a walk in his stroller. We were all expecting an uneventful walk and Dawn, my mother, and myself were all just enjoying each other's company. Then, as I was pushing the stroller, Landon made an odd sound. I quickly leaned down to check on him thinking he was upset. But I quickly noticed he was LAUGHING!! I said "he's laughing!!" and we all started crying in the middle of the street. Its amazing how healing the sound of a single laugh can be. He continued to laugh all the way through the walk and all of our spirits launched sky high.

That was his turning point...his personality started to return to us. He began to remember old games we would play, and old things we would say to him. Finally we made it in to see Landon's pediatrician. We were in her office and Landon was rolling around on the paper bed laughing and giggling. He was doing fantastic and we were all laughing with him. His doctor was beyond confused. She had be informed by our PT of how poor his condition was and couldn't believe how amazingly far he had already come! We learned later that the doctor was so worried about his performance in PT that she was contemplating readmitting him into the hospital. After seeing how far he had come, she reconsidered. Landon is truely a fighter.

Over the next week, we went to physical therapy and occupational therapy every other day. Landon continued to make amazing strides. He is no longer stiff and enjoys to be touched and played with. He is moving the left side of his body extremely well. His right side is loosening up and he is starting to use it again. Our therapists are so pleased with his recovery that they are even having trouble setting goals for him because of how much he progresses from each visit.

More time went by and he recovered more and more! We have now been going to PT and OT for about 2 weeks. We have been working on Landon's weight bearing and some other gross motor skills. Just two weeks ago he couldn't move at all, and now he can almost sit up by himself! We may have a really long road ahead of us, but we have all been inspired by Landon's spirit and I think he is the one keeping Dawn and I up now. We are amazed every day!

Thank you to everyone for all your energy and all your prayers. It has truely done magic and I know Landon will never give up. He is my hero.

One final note, we went and saw Landon's doctor again today and heard the results of the MRI after a radiologist in Omaha took a look at it....and well, they said it was normal. As in normal normal, no brain damage. We need to do another MRI to find out what the deal is, but we are apprehensive about putting Landon under sedation again, so we have decided to wait a month and see how he progresses. Landon's doctor said that Landon's loss of skills is still a normal result from an arrest. Unfortunately, no one knows anything else at this time. We will post more as soon as we know anything.

We're still in Denver....

I'm not sure how many of you know about Landon, so I decided to write on here to give everyone an update.

We made our way to Denver on Monday and stayed overnight in a small town a little more than half way to Denver, so that we could take Landon to the Denver aquarium on Tuesday. We ended up taking Landon to see the fish, but he wasn't all that interested in the fish...only the exit signs and the numbers on the tanks...I don't know...he's a funny kid.

On Wednesday we took Landon in for his procedure and waited in the waiting room like we always do, preparing ourselves for the mad Landon we always get back. As we were waiting we heard someone call over the intercom system a "code blue" for someone in radiology. Braydon and I got really scared, but reassured ourselves that he was fine. About 10 minutes later, as Braydon decided he needed to use the bathroom, a nurse came into the waiting room and called for us. I stood up and made my way over to her and she said that she needed to speak with us and immediately my heart dropped. As we were waiting for Braydon, I asked her if everything was alright, and she just kept saying that she needed to speak to both of us. When Braydon got back from the bathroom, she walked us into the hallway and told us that at the end of Landon's procedure his heartrate had dropped to lower than 60 beats per minute, and they had to start CPR on him. She took us close to where Landon's procedure room was and we waited as nurses and doctors (even the AirLife people that take people to hospitals in the helicopter) came in and out of his room. Occasionally someone would come out and tell us that he had a good heartbeat and blood pressure. What felt like 30 minutes later, the doctors came out and told us that at the end of the procedure when they were just about to move Landon onto a bed to take him to recovery, he ended up having a bronciospasm basically where the broncials close off. They think that at that time Landon had air in his lungs and went to cough and therefore punctured both of his lungs, and his lungs collapsed. That's what made his heartbeat drop and why they needed to perform CPR. It was something that happens occasionally, but they hadn't seen it to this degree.

Landon has been in the PICU since Wednesday, but is doing really well. They had to put chest tubes into his chest to get all the air out so his lungs would be alright. They just removed those yesterday, and they haven't seen any air in his chest cavity since then....which is good. :) He is off all of the medications they were giving him. He didn't get much sleep last night and we were worried cause he kept stiffening up like he was in pain. When we talked to the doctor today, she said that he might be having withdrawals from some of the medications he was on. So we're going to have a couple more days of trying to get him off the pain medications. Fun! :)

All in all, it was a tramatic experience, but it also taught me and Braydon a lot. We're going to slow down with the procedures and not come back until early fall. The anestesiologist said that it might have been caused due to the fact that he only had 6 weeks to recover and he might have needed longer than that. So we are going to take her advice, plus for the fact that we don't want to put ourselves through that again so soon. He will need these procedures, so we have to figure out a way to get them for him. The anestesiologist also said that now we will take extra procaution when we do it again.

We have also learned to not take anyone for granted. Braydon and I both thought we were going to lose Landon on Wednesday. We're glad we didn't and we won't take anyday we get with him for granted. Hopefully, this can also help others reading this to learn the same lesson. We are so happy that Landon came out of this and we will be even more excited when we get to take him home and spend more time with him.

I want to thank everyone that already knew about this for all of your concern and support through all of this. It was very reassuring to know that you all cared. Thank you so much. We love you all and I'll keep everyone updated. XOXO