Renny had a follow up hearing test today since she failed her newborn screen in one ear.  The verdict is that there is some sort of nerve delay but they don’t think it will be anything that has any developmental impact.  The doctors said that lots of people have this ‘delay’ and neither they or anyone else even notices it.  So we’ll see.  Or hear.  Something like that.  A follow up will occur in 6 months or so.

On the Neurosurgeon front, at this point, we’ve decided not to make a decision, with the exception that we’re going to continue to see Dr. F for general purposes here and only reconsider the matter if a shunt revision (the fancy word for redoing the shunt, ie, more cranial surgery) is necessary.

We’re on the look out for Chiari Two Formation symptoms which tend to be associated with Spina Bifida and manifest early on.  We already know from the MRI that Renny has this formation, so now again, it’s wait and see.

You know what they say- you can pick your nose, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. Here is another thing you can’t pick: Your neurosurgeon.

It all goes back to April 17th, the day that Renny was born. We had it all lined up with the neurosurgeon here in town to have Renny’s back surgery the day after her birth and her shunt installation (ie, brain surgery, I guess you could call it) a day or so after that. However, our neurosurgeon was out of town and the on call neurosurgeon was not a pediatric neurosurgeon. The upshot is that rather than having our local neurosurgeon, whom I shall call Dr. F, Renny was airlifted to Madison where a certain Dr. A handled the pediatric neurosurgery.

Now, Dr. A’s preferences were a little different then Dr. F’s. Dr. A preferred to do both operations in a single go. Dr. F had mentioned that some prefer to do it this way but he preferred taking a day or two break in order to prevent infection. This was not the concern. As discussed briefly in the big summary, Dr. A was also fond of a certain procedure, called the ETV. In recent years it has been shown to ‘work’ in younger and younger children, including infants. Dr. F never mentioned the ETV, which is too bad, because it had some definite advantages. But Dr. A didn’t quite paint the full picture either, informing me that one complication might be hitting a certain vein, but not telling me that this is most likely a fatal complication. As it turns out, since Dr. A couldn’t see the vein to miss it, he did not make the attempt. However, in the future, if Renny has a shunt infection (likely) they can make another run at things.

My wife and I gained the distinct impression that both men knew of each other and both men didn’t exactly care for the other’s style. We certainly knew what Dr. F thought of the ETV- unproven. Dr. A is just as insistent that we use him for future neurosurgical needs and clearly believes Renny would be in much better hands with him.

Now, here comes the kicker.

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I mentioned in the big summary that Renny failed her newborn hearing screen in one ear.  She has had one follow up exam and she has been upgraded from “She is deaf in this ear” to “Well, everything looks like it should be working, but we’re getting this wierd result we can’t explain….”  One idea is that there is still liquid where it isn’t supposed to be.  Anyway, another audiology follow up to come in late June.

This post will be long. 12 pages in Microsoft Word, long. Just warning you. It is the summary of events and reactions beginning with the news that we were expecting until now- and Renny is a month old now.

 

So here goes.

 

My wife and I had three boys already when we learned that we were expecting another child. I still have vivid memories of the 20 week ultrasound on the last pregnancy. The ultrasound technician asked all sorts of odd questions prompting me to wonder if something was wrong and prompting my wife to wonder if perhaps she was further along. The technician snapped an image of what appeared to be two grape fruits in my wife’s belly. It took a moment for reality to sink in: we were expecting twins. Twin boys. 

Three years later, we were eager for the 20 week ultrasound for a number of reasons. In the first place, we very much wanted to see if our next child would be a girl. And preferably, very, very, very preferably, not another set of twins (quote: “Dear God, pleeease not twins). As you may guess, our twin boys have been quite a challenge. We took our oldest son to this ultrasound and enjoyed watching his reaction to the images on the monitor. You would think that with such a cute boy talking about the baby images, the technician would feed into it more.

But the technician was surprisingly quiet. Neither of us thought much about it, but we did notice it. We were overjoyed when the technician assured us that it was a girl and it wasn’t twins. Oddly, even after I jokingly asked him to check again, he only quietly offered his assurance again. In retrospect, his mood was easily understood- we would have much more important things to consider very shortly.

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I wrote this entry on my sntjohnny blog specifically in response to learning that my girl had Spina Bifida.  It is the first thing that I put down on ‘paper’ on the matter so I include it here for completeness sake.  The entry itself refers to an attorney’s letter.  In fact, it was in reference to the results of the ultrasound.

http://sntjohnny.com/front/archives/34

The truth is that I’ve never been a big fan of the whole ‘blogging’ thing and never understood the appeal.  If I want a discussion I like the good ol’fashion discussion forum format.  Until recently, I didn’t think that I had much to share in a blog that I couldn’t and don’t share in one of my discussion forums.  After some consideration about where I should step into the whole blogging scene from the whole ‘web log’ ‘live journal’ type scene, I decided to return to this blog here at horvathsworld.com.  According to the ‘About Me’ this blog was meant to present a more holistic description of my thoughts and views, in particular politics- which I view as connected but distinct from my religious thoughts.

I am explaining all of this because I think that there is a new development in my life that people would be interested in reading about while much of the other content on this blog may be uninteresting.  This ‘new development’ is about as a-political as you can get, so entries about that along with every thing else may put some people ‘off.’  I have no intention of purging out aspects of my life just because some find them offensive- there are just as many that embrace them.  But I do want to give some warning that I take my libertarian-constitutionalist politics seriously and they flow from some core beliefs within my worldview.  If you are uninterested in that sort of thing you’ll have to wade through it for the stuff that may interest you.  And what would that be, you ask?

In December of 2006 during a regularly scheduled ultrasound my wife and I learned that our child had Spina Bifida.

We’ve already come a long way since then.  We’ve had our baby girl, whom I shall call on this blog, Renny, and had a couple of surgeries and a variety of experiences. 

About 6 weeks ago I realized that my experiences were such that others may benefit from them and I began contemplating whether or not I should share them, and how.  The re-constituting of this blog is the result.  I will share some of my stories and some of the resources that have been helpful.  Because I have come into this late, I will have to spend some time giving some of the story to this point, and that will be a job for a later post.

So hey.  Maybe my life is interesting right now.  I’ve got a new baby with Spina Bifida.  I’ve got a new addition going onto our house.  I’ve got a new book that I’m promoting- which means interesting events and stories about agents.  I have an apologetics ministry I have been trying for years to get off the ground.  I’ve got twin boys that are tiny tornados and an oldest boy that is the only sane one in the house.  Maybe my life is interesting enough to justify ‘blogging’ on.  Or not.  At anyrate, I’ll be blogging. 

You can see the links to the right for places I am active on the web but given my new emphasis on recounting my experiences with a Spina Bifida baby (henceforth, SB), you can expect a new look in time.  I have also created a category for my posts on Spina Bifida so that if that is all you’re interested in you can just sort out those posts automatically.

Thanks for dropping in.

I feel like I could have predicted the last 6 years after 9-11.  I should have put it in writing.  *sigh*

Here are four thoughts I have on changes we should make to our election system.

1.  Remove the electoral college.  The electoral college served a purpose at one time, but no longer.  Let’s start relying on the popular vote and the popular vote only.

2.  Remove the two term limit for Presidents.  The second terms of presidents since the enactment of the limit have been pretty bad.  Well, for one thing, the very day they begin their second term the presidents are ‘lame ducks.’  Politicians can just decide to try to ride them out for four years.  Also, the presidents themselves have no incentive to run a tight ship.  After all, they’re not up for re-election, right?

3.  Adjust the rules of Congress from an unbiased position.  Currently, the rules of Congress are decided… by Congress.  Whoever holds the majority in either house is able to set the rules for how things are conducted.  Ie, committee chairs, filibuster quoroms, etc.  While its true that the minority party is the one that gets the shaft, I am more concerned about third party and independents.  We need more of these, but they are rendered useless by the very drawing up of rules.

4.  One such rule that needs to be adjusted belongs to a package of ideas I have.  It is absurd to me that the whole control of a house can be determined in an election of only a small percentage of either house.  Only a small fraction of America was given the ability to dictate to the rest of us the agenda of the whole country.  So, for example, the rule that the house majority gets to assign committee chairs could be adjusted so that committee chair wanna-bes put their name in a hat- no matter what party- and whoever get’s selected, that’s the chair.  Third parties and Independants now have a chance.  As it is right now, even though I want to vote for a third party (and many I know would like to, as well), its a vote for the party that I really really don’t like.

This little essay is not meant to add or subtract to arguments concerning the war in Iraq.  It is not about the moral perception of America that the world may or may not have- rightly or wrongly (or if we care).  It is about the military capabilities of America, and specifically how it might appear to America’s enemies.  That said, I believe that this analysis puts the lie to a great number of arguments that are out there.  I may discuss certain examples.  In fact, I’ll start out with Iran.

Iran is certainly working to de-stablize Iraq, but the talk about Iran being the new power brokers in the region forgets one very critical fact:  The United States has about 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan.  It is not as though in a crisis we’d have to wait for our forces to deploy into the region.  They are already there, and Iran certainly knows it.  This probably forms a large part of the rationale for why Iran wants an unstable Iraq, despite the fact that the majority of Iraqis are Shia, just like Iran.  So long as Iraq is unstable, (and George Bush is president), they want American forces pinned down in Iraq.  If the Iraqi government was stable, this would free American forces up to move… and they are in a close proximity to move.  This, I believe, is why Iran is rushing their nuclear program right now.  They want it to get done while America is pinned down and/or Bush is still in office.   A new President promising to withdraw the US quickly makes those troops available for an incursion into Iran ‘while they are there.’

It is the fact that there are a quarter of a million American troops, many of which are national guardsmen and not normally active forces, in Iraq fighting a war and putting down an insurgency that figures into the calculations of other nations.   When the conflict is over, America will have what no other nation currently has:  a significant sized battle tested, battle refined, battle hardened, American army. Read more

If you were going to ask me what my largest objection to the Iraqi war is, it would be this: we did not issue a formal declaration of war.

I believe many of the criticisms and complaints against the Bush admin is derived from the fact that we do not have a formal declaration of war on the table. Instead, our nebulous ‘war on terror’ is almost in principle ‘open-ended.’ Most people agree that you will never be able to completely stamp out international terrorism. Even if you did a good job in that stamping, a single man could force an entire nation to ramp up its security, at great cost. By way of example, a single man could slap a bomb on an oil pump in Iraq (or elsewhere) and drive gasoline prices up a dollar or more a gallon. That’s a lot of power in the hand of one man with access to ‘over the counter’ ingredients to a bomb. That’s just an economic cost, of course. The point is, in a world of 7 billion, you can never root out every last ‘man.’ Thus, the ‘war on terror’ has no well defined end.

This is why the ‘war powers’ of the President is such a concern. Its true that FDR has abused the war powers of the president far more than Bush. Read more

Tammy Bruce compared the situation with the Times revealing secret information with the Rosenbergs revealing secret information.  The Rosenbergs, of course, were executed.  Tammy’s point is the same as mine.  It goes as far back as the Plame incident and the so-called ‘domestic’ wire-tapping, etc.  The Plame incident was minor- but there was an investigation, and still is one on-going.  The media does not want any kind of investigation about their leaks, however.  Somehow, when an incident is embarrasing to the White House, it demands an investigation.  When it is the Media in the cross hairs, they are just performing their ‘first amendment duty.’

First amendment duty or not, an investigation should be had.
Are the people dispersing these leaks only trying to reveal the corruption at the White House as honorable, God-fearing whistle-blowers?  An investigation will reveal as much.  But I don’t  think it is anything of the sort.  These leaks are going to the news media, not to people like Arlen Specter.  If these programs are so serious, why not take the information to the Congress directly?  In such a scenario, the Congress could petition the White House for more information and the White House could try to explain their case.  If no resolution is possible, let the Congress leak it: in the form of a resolution or legislation!

But this is not what these ‘patriots’ want.  They want a public uproar.  There’s just one problem:  there is no way that I could ever be in a position to evaluate these programs on their merits in order to ‘roar.’  In fact, most of the people who hear these things have no way to verify the contents of the programs or hear the evidences that the WH has to offer as justification.  Not even the media has this full access.  Who does?  Only the Congress.

These program leaks are, in my opinion, smear campaigns.  If an investigation reveals otherwise, so be it.  But have the investigation.