Utah Trip - Part 1

We drove home from Thatcher Saturday afternoon, only to repack and prepare for our trip to Utah early Sunday morning, for Kenny's brother, Danny's Wedding on Tuesday in SLC. We were planning on staying with my sister and brother in law, Kristin and Taylor in Provo. On our drive from Safford, we got a call that Kristin was in the hospital after having an emergency appendectomy because her appendix burst that morning! Taylor said we could still stay at their apartment but they would both be at the hospital for several more days. I was glad we could go see her and try to help her!

We caravaned with Megan and Justin and made pretty good time up to Flagstaff. But just past Flag there was a fatal accident between a semi-truck and a mini-van, shutting down the highway. We sat for about 30 minutes when we noticed people traveling along a dirt trail a little ways off the highway. When we found out we would be waiting over 3 hours for the highway to re-open, we decided to take the trail. It took about 20 minutes to drive the couple mile stretch, and was very bumpy and dusty, but was well worth it! Other than that, the drive was pretty uneventful (thank goodness)!

Our dusty detour
We finally made it to my brother, Wes' house in Spanish Fork about 7pm, just in time for a yummy Sunday dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and veggies! So good after the drive! We visited with his family for a bit, then Wes took us to Krissy and Taylor's house to get Kenny and the kids settled and I went to the hospital to see Krissy.

She was doing alright, but not great. She had originally gone to the emergency room on Friday morning because she had a lot of stomach pain and had been vomiting for 2 days straight. They said the tests were inconclusive and sent her home with some morphine. Of course the pain returned after the medication wore off and it got worse over night, so they went back to the ER on Saturday when they did a CT scan and found her appendix had burst. They did labroscopic surgery and actually removed it through her belly-button (didn't know you could do that!) and even gave her pictures of the surgery. She had alot of pain from the toxins released into her system when her appendix burst, as well as the actual surgery, so she was on pain medication that made her loopy, but also nauseous. The nurse on duty used to work in surgery, and looked at the pictures of her surgery and told her that her appendix looked very bad with discoloration and a lot of sores on it that were most likely leaking toxins into her body for quite sometime. When she checked in, they told her that her white blood cell count was over 21,000, and on Sunday night she was down to 18,000. The nurse told us it should be below 10,000 and most healthy people are around 6 or 8,000. He also told us about his son who was once sick and had a blood count of 18,000 and the hospital wouldn't release him to go to another hospital unless they transported him because it was so deadly! He was very surprised they hadn't found it on Friday (our thoughts exactly!). Yikes!

Krissy and our nieces Ashley and Brittany
And her yucky surgery pics
On Monday we took the boys down to the hospital to visit Krissy and TayNor (as Mckay calls him), which was a little hectic with 4 little boys and a small hospital room, so we didn't stay long. Then we went to Wes' house for a Memorial Day BBQ, Yummy! We ate and watched movies and I took a little nap. Later we met Kenny's family at Chuck E Cheese's in Orem for dinner. Kenny's Uncle Mike was in town for the wedding so it was a good chance to visit with him and Danny and Gwen before the wedding. Also to let the kids run and play since it was raining most of the day. Everyone had a lot of fun and the kids ended up with over 1000 tickets!