The Many Faces of Isaac

Yesterday, Heidi was at the Hospital Buen Samaritano in the morning, where she met with Danny and Janeane again and saw a half a dozen or so patients. Add one more surgery to the list of upcomings. This one is a young woman who has a uterus, according to Heidi, "the size of a Christmas turkey". These are technical terms, so if you don't catch them all, realize that she's had 13 years of post-high school education, and don't feel bad.

In all seriousness, though, we ask you all to pray very faithfully for this young lady (her name is Virginia) over the next few weeks. Her surgery is scheduled for the 26th of this month, but she is quite anemic currently and this will NOT be an easy surgery or one with inherently low amounts of blood loss. There is no blood bank here, and the lady has no family to go to for pre-operative blood donation. We have her on a treatment plan of iron supplements and fervent prayer currently, and will re-assess the need to find blood donors a few days prior to surgery. If all else fails, at least we know her surgeon is O negative!

Matt and Isaac were home and spent some father-son time. This means that Isaac was too fussy to be put down and Matt didn't get any real work done.

In the afternoon, though, Matt got to the gym, worked a bit around the house, Heidi made dinner, and we had our friends Toby and Brittany over for dinner and some nice English conversation. They left around midnight.

Luckily, Duane had called during the day on Friday and said that clinic in Canilla was cancelled because they've been stuck in Guatemala City with various things going on. We'll do clinic in San Andres tomorrow, but today is a surprise day off!!!

Please keep us, the Fickers, and the whole town of San Andres in your prayers. San Andres is a pretty volatile town and tomorrow is Election Day. There has already been some violence in town, but let's pray that it's all basically over at this point.

Isaac was nice enough to give us nearly 10 hours last night, but since he went to bed a lot earlier than we did, he also got up earlier than we really wanted to. So Daddy got up with him and got some very cute pictures. We'll share...