Health Hazards

The past few months have had their share of health problems in the Sturm home. On the bright side, at least we are going to reach our deductible nice and early this year!

We passed around some sickness right before Christmas. Caleb had it the worst and was down for several days during his first-ever round of high school finals. He handled it like a champ and managed to do a great job on his finals! It turns out he had the flu. We found that out when he went in to the doctor for an odd skin rash that was forming. That ended up being a Staph infection and he immediately started some killer antibiotics.

We made it through the holidays without much else, but mid-January brought about a drastic increase in the random stomach issues Caleb had all Fall. He started having episodes of extreme pain and cramping that began to happen more and more frequently. After leaving school early one day and seeing him in excruciating pain, we took him to urgent care where they drew blood and even did a CT scan. Not much showed up there, so we were referred to a pediatric GI doc. After and ultrasound and endoscopy (and several more flare ups), he was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome due to stress and anxiety. This opened up a whole new can of worms that we're still in the process of working through, but at least we have some answers!

Joel felt like Caleb didn't need to get all of the attention, so he went ahead and got a concussion at wrestling practice! When we picked him up from practice, he let us know that he had a bad run in with the mat after being dropped on his head, but he didn't seem to make a big deal of it. We carried on with life and he was fine for 24 hours. Then the symptoms began. He spent an entire night throwing up every hour on the hour. He had terrible headaches and was extremely sensitive to light. The doctor at urgent care diagnosed him with a concussion and the poor kid had to spend the next three weeks adhering to some pretty strict restrictions....no sports, no recess, and NO screens! We were all quite thankful when he was finally symptom free and could get the all clear from his doctor! Needless to say, we're going to think long and hard about what the future of his sports career will look like. We know that concussions can happen anywhere, but we sure don't want to have him go through this again if we can help avoid it.

On top of all of these major health scares, we managed to pass around some yuck early in February. Tyler tested positive for Covid and was down for the count for several days. We're assuming that the other two people to fall ill around that same time (Mom and Caleb) probably also had Covid. We aren't sure how the younger two avoided it, but we're glad they did!