for those NOT in the know...

so I have been getting some responses from friends from Mexico about Mikayla and her condition... for those who already know... sorry!! just skip this one, for the rest here is the 411 on our little girl.

Mikayla was born with "tumors" in her face called lymphangiomas. (they are thin sacs of lymph fluid) she also was born with her right eye physically smaller than her left, and bad vision in that eye (the Drs said it was underdeveloped) when she was born, the OB used forceps to deliver her, so just before going home, the pediatrician advised doing a CT scan to check for fractures in her facial bones, because she had ALOT of swelling in her face. What they found was totally off the charts! not at all what they were looking for. aside form the swelling (the tumors) and her eye being underdeveloped, she had a mass in her brain. but they were not able to diagnose what it was and while they discussed it, a nurse came in to our room and told us our new baby girl had a brain tumor. TRAUMA... (come to find out that she was TOTALLY uninformed!!) We left from the maternity ward to go straight to see a neurosurgeon at Primary Childrens Hospital in SLC... they finally figured out that the mass was actually a brain hemorrhage. Her brain had bled at some point during pregnancy, and the blood had calcified. Needless to say we have had ALOT of doctors over the past 6 years!! and she had 4 surgeries before her 4th birthday.

During her 1st surgery (she was 16 months old) the surgeon severed the connective tissue in her right eyelid, (picture #1) so it filled up with the lymph fluid and tissue from her tumors and got so big that her eyelid actually flipped inside out. That perpetrated her second surgery about 6 months later (she was 23 months old). Luckily we lived in Seattle Washington then and had an AMAZING surgeon!! he really did great work on her and got all the tumors out of her face (picture #3). Unfortunately, during this time her brain hemorrhages were getting bigger and ended up causing a MAJOR seizure, so we spent 3 days in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). So now she is on anti seizure meds, and still has small seizures every once in a while. Her brain is still hemorrhaging, also. She had brain surgery about 2 years ago, (she was about 3 1/2 yrs old) and now we are hearing from her neurosurgeon that she is going to need another brain surgery sometime in the coming year (at about 7 years old) ... and then her eye surgeon still wants to do more plastic surgery to try and finish fixing her eyelid but he is waiting for her to get a little older first.

Despite all she has been through, she is an amazing kid!! she is smart, and cute, funny, and so brave and strong!! now you see why she is our inspiration!

sorry for the picture quality... these are all from my old dinosaur camera with the film so I had to scan and upload them... the first is Kayla and I before her 1st surgery, the second is after her eyelid was disconnected and filled with tumor, and the 3rd is after her surgery to remove the tumors and fix her eyelid... sorry I couldn't find her brain surgery pictures... but you can see from her current pictures how great she looks!!