Sadness for a dear friend

I was going to write today just about the flooding that has overwhelmed Jakarta. Over 100,000 people have been made homeless and 6 people have died. This is the worst flooding to hit Jakarta in 5 years. We have been largely unaffected and the house we are to move into is just fine. For more information about the flooding, you can click here and here.

Instead, I will write about something very sad that has befallen a friend of mine and her family. I learned today that a best friend's sister was discovered to be suffering from severe preeclampsia and had to deliver her baby boy at 24 weeks. This is a dear friend from high school, and I know her sister and have actually followed in her footsteps in many ways, from working in a couple places where she worked, going to the same university, traveling overseas, and going into public health. She has hosted me in her house a couple times and is one of the most fun, spunky, and kind people I know. My heart is breaking for her and the whole family, and I wish them all the strength and fortune in the world to get through this.

I have read up some on preeclampsia to learn more about it. If you are interested in finding out more, you can click here. From what I read, preeclampsia is a hypertensive disorder that has mostly unknown causes. It can be undetected for a long time, and can become serious very quickly. When serious, it can lead to eclampsia, with symptoms such as seizures and difficulty breathing. It is one of the main known causes of premature birth in the developed world and one of the main causes of maternal and infant illness and death around the world.

Let's hope for the best for little A and his family.

And there is another little baby boy out there to pray for. Another friend of mine gave birth to a boy last summer who was discovered to have a heart defect. He needed open heart surgery within days to repair the heart defect, called the Transposition of the Great Arteries. He recovered from the surgery very well, but it was recently discovered that there was severe scarring and unfortunately will need open heart surgery again in the near future. She keeps a beautiful blog about her son and her first child, a girl born with Downs Syndrome, at Wonderbabe.

So, all of my prayers and good wishes go out to these two little boys, and to their amazing mothers and families.