Happy Holidays!

My last pair of customs for the year and most likely for a few months. These are Mosiac Moon Treasure Map on Aran BFL. I really love knitting this colorway up and I am impressed that it knit up so nicely. These are being mailed out today to their new owner. I have also been working feverishly to finish up my christmas knitting one item left and I will be done!

We also had a kind of last minute appointment with V's Neurologist down state. Her seizures just were not getting any better and we felt that with each increase of the new medication we would decrease her seizure frequency but the seizures themselves would get much worse, not the best trade off. So we discussed our options and we decided to add a third medicine until her surgery. Like all of the other meds this one can have some funky side effects but I am really hoping we won't see any of those. So here is to hoping that a third drug gets some of what we are seeing under control.

I also had a chance to discuss a few other issues we've been seeing. For example after particularly bad seizure days V's pupils are two dramatically different sizes and will stay that way for upwards of 24 hours before they return to the same size. I figured it was "normal" for that to happen sometimes and he assured me it is. We also discussed the keotogenic diet again. He feels (and we agree) that because there is little hope that V will outgrow her seizures the keotogenic diet is not a great option for us. The only way it would provide any therapeutic value is if she stayed on it for life, and that is not a reasonable way to eat for your entire life. He did say he was a firm believer in it but that he preferred to use it in children who have seizures that are resistant to medicine (like V) AND who he feels are likely to outgrow their seizures so the diet would only be used for a relatively short period of time (like less then 10 years versus an entire lifetime). The surgery is her best option to be seizure free, we fully agree but it was good to hear someone confirming that yet again for us.

So really the sum of all of that is that we are kind of in a holding pattern right now until her surgery, just working to do what we can to try and keep her seizures under control with the least amount of side effects until the big day.

How I hate going out in the cold...

So I stayed in all day yesterday and knit. I just finished these, they need to go out ASAP to hopefully make it to Canada in time for a little boys birthday at the end of the month so these are unblocked and I will simply use some spray lanolin in the wet zone to make them ready to wear. The flash really picked up the white and makes it look like these have some kind of stripey pooling going on but in real life you don't notice it at all (it actually surprised me how the picture makes these look like they pooled). I love this colorway, Mosaic Moon Gaia II on Aran BFL, and these worked up really nicely. I hope the new owner loves them.

Nothing new to report for V, she is still having daily seizures and the med increase we did last week has made it so she no longer gets blue lips during a seizure but each seizure lasts longer and she is back to having 4+ a day. We plan to give it a few more days to see if it evens out at all as this med tends to take a full week before we see the true affect of a dose increase, but if it keeps up like this I think we are going to ask to be taken off of it and try something new. It has made her seizures go from relatively short (less then a minute), quite with mostly lip smacking and picking to longer seizures (always more then 2 minutes) with moaning, slapping, scratching, wandering and falling down while wandering. I hate taking her off a med and starting a new one though, the seizure meds have such bizarre side affects that it feels that with every med switch we trade one not so fun one for another. One med made her super hyper and overly aggresive, so we took her off that and put her on a new one that made her anorexic and caused her to throw up during seizures, so we took her off of that and put her on this one which seems to make her seizures worse rather then better and causes her to feel like she has to use the bathroom constantly (that makes car trips loads of fun).

P.S.  If you see my Mom wish her a Happy Birthday!

In the spirit

I finished this cute little sweater as a gift for one of DH's coworkers and his wife their first was born earlier this week. I adore these buttons on this sweater, so cute and sweet. My husband is giving it to them when he stops by to see them today. I am working on two projects right now. A pair of longies with MM Gwoin II for a customer, they are almost finished the second leg should be done tonight and I should have ends weaved and the drawstring done by Saturday so they will be ready to ship Monday. These knit up wonderfully and I love the detail of the stripes at the bottom. The other project I am working on is a Faraway So Close shawl for a customer done with some MM Unexpected Rainbow I have had in my stash for a bit. I truly love and adore this pattern, this is now the third one I have knit and they just go so fast for me. I have plans to make one more for myself in February.

We met with the neurosurgeon for V on Tuesday. We both really liked him, he answered all of our questions honestly and addressed every concern we had. I feel like we have a real true picture now of what we face and what things will be like after the surgery. We were also shocked when we left his office and he took us straight to his assistant and we scheduled her surgery. She goes in February 16th, faster then we ever imagined. There are risks but he feels (and we agree) that those risks are minimal compared with how this will change her life. The main risks are infection of the incision site, menengitis and bleeding which can lead to strokes. They are minimal risks though and not something that they generally see after the surgery. The more real risks are that she will lose a small pie shaped piece of her eyesight in one eye, it will not interfere with her ability to drive though and most likely she will never even notice it is missing, and that she will have problems with verbal memory later on in life. They have to remove the entire hippocampus of her left temporal lobe and that area controls memory and more specifically verbal memory. So when she gets older in school she may have a really hard time taking notes in classes, and learning material when it is just presented verbally -- all things we can work with though and far better then a life of worsening seizures. This surgery means she may have a chance to drive when she turns 16, she will be able to learn how to swim, she will be able to learn how to ride a bike, she can take baths without one of us in the room, she will be able to play any sport she wants and she will be able to live a life that is far more independent then the future she was facing with seizures. The surgeon believes that for her the surgery has a 70-80% chance of working, and those are odds I am hoping swing in her favor. It took me a bit to post this as we have been processing all of this and adjusting to the idea that this is going to happen in 2 months (when we began this journey we were told it could take upwards of a year and a half to get to the surgery). We are very hopeful this will work for her but if it does not my husband and I are prepared, and we have plans in place for moving forward with making her life as normal as possible.

With the surgery now in our very near future I will be taking a short break from customs. I have one pair of custom longies left to start and finish and after that there will most likely be one more slot that I offer with a quick turnaround time for January. PKat Pants will then take a break for a few months from Their Own Knitted World and from customs. I hope to return to custom knitting soon but for now I need to focus on my family, I have loved all of the knitting I have done over the years for my customers and I hope to return to knitting for all of you sometime next year.

Another Christmas gift finished and another close-up picture. I also began working on a cardigan my husband asked me to knit as a gift for a coworker and his wife expecting their first in a few weeks. I should finish this tonight and then on to the next project.