My Tony Baloney

Our little Tony, who will be 7 in only 5 days, has had us pretty scared for the past week and a half. For the past couple months, he's been getting these headaches. I'd give him some Tylenol and he'd get better. I started to notice a pattern with them though that bothered me. His headaches were almost always in the morning when he first woke up or overnight and he'd come into our room complaining of one. Most of the times this happened, he would at some point throw up. He'd always want a cold cloth on his forehead and eventually he'd start to feel better and then be fine the rest of the day. It came to a head on the Thurs. before the 4th of July weekend. Once again, he woke up with a bad headache and eventually threw up. I decided that day to call his dr. and set up an appt. Ya see, I knew that it was not a good thing to wake up with a headache all the time and to have one bad enough to wake him up at night. I also knew that the fact that they made him throw up was not good either. We went to see the dr. and she agreed. She looked behind his eyes with a scope and that looked good, and she did some balance and neurological tests on him and those were good. But it was the time of the headaches and the pattern of them that concerned her. She said she didn't like that they were waking him up. She set up an order for him to get an MRI of his brain. When I called to make the appt. they didn't have an opening for a whole week. We would have to wait until the following Friday. That made it the longest week of my life. Sometimes I could get it out of my head for a while, but most times I was on the edge of tears. Just telling someone at work made my heart start to pound and make me start breathing heavy...I couldn't even talk, and I certainly couldn't say the word.

That terrible word that we all knew this was about, but never wanted to mention.

Was it a tumor.

I still shutter at the thought.

When we got to the MRI appointment, they had not set him up for sedation. Usually it's necessary for kids to be put out because of how still they have to hold. They literally cannot move a muscle. This is all while being inside a big tube with a contraption over your head/face and very loud noises going off for over 20 minutes. They said we may have to reschedule. Um, I don't think so.....I told him no way. We already waited a week for this appt. We were gonna give it a try. They gave Tony some headphones (to which I had them put on KTIS cuz I knew he'd recognize all the music, also because this was about as good a time as any for some Jesus music) and they put a mirror right above his head so he could look out of the tube and see Jay and I there with him. The tech said we'd give him 2 tries and then we'd have to reschedule. Well, he didn't need 2 tries, he did great the very first time. He didn't even move a toe. I was able to sit by his feet and hold his ankle. I could tell when he looked at me and I would give him a smile to reassure him. Jason just watched and had this look of dread on his face. It's not easy seeing your child in an MRI tube.
All I did was pray.
The whole time.
We got done (much to the astonishment of the tech who said he'd never seen a child that age stay that still) and were told to expect some results by Monday.
So, yesterday came and went most of the day with no word. By 4:30, I decided to call our dr. office to see if she could get some results for us. She's out of town for a week, so they had a nurse call me back to talk to.
When I got the call, she told me that every thing came back NORMAL. I did a double take because I wasn't expecting an answer from her, I thought I was just gonna talk to her about checking into it for me. So she repeated it. Normal. I started crying and told her how worried we were. She said she didn't blame me one bit and that I should hang up the phone and take a deep breath....he's okay.
This was by far the most scared Jay and I have ever been with one of our kids.
We are just so grateful and thankful that our prayers were answered. Yesterday, I was thinking about the parents who don't get the good news we did....and I said a prayer for them.