An update from Todd

Wow.  I don't know where to start.  I have just read through all of the comments on Facebook and the blog and the emails we have received and I am over whelmed.

Thanks for all of the prayers and kind words of support.

As Tamara posted, I am feeling so much better and stronger today.  I am not 100% yet, but I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

I hope you never get sick, but if you do Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis is a phenomenal place to get well.  I have been so impressed with the hospital staff.  Everyone from the man who took our insurance info at ER, to the ER doctors and nurses, to the young man who pushed my bed from ER up to my regular room to the 8-10 doctors who came as a group to talk about my progress this morning, to the cleaning staff, have been exceptional.  In any organization with 10,000 employees there must be a few bad apples, but I sure have not been able to find any here!  BarnesJewish is a teaching hospital attached to Washington University Medical School so it is full of vivacious young people anxious to learn everything so they can help save and improve the lives of complete strangers.  It is also full of very experienced doctors that have already given most of there lives to medicine, but who are still pushing the frontiers of science to understand and explain these wonderful bodies of ours and their varied issues and complications.
I just can't say enough good about the best health care system in the world and about Barnes-Jewish.

As the day has progressed, I am continuing to gain strength and the pain and stiffness is subsiding.  I am on three different powerful antibiotics.  At this point the doctors have not been able to identify what infection triggered all of this, but the antibiotic is kicking it, what ever it is.

It sounds like I will stay her for at least another day while they are waiting for some of the blood and spinal fluid cultures to grow.

Tamara is going home this afternoon so that she can spend the night with the children and give Mary a little break.  I don't know what we would have done without Mary!  Tamara has done such a good job training the children,  that I am sure they could have kept the house, cared for the younger children, taken care of the animals and done all of the farm chores by themselves.  But is nice to know that there is a loving heart and adult eye watching over them too.

Thanks again for all of your thoughts and prayers.
-Todd