Amos Ross Updates

Dear friends and family,

Amos and I returned on Wednesday afternoon from our latest California trip. It was a very short trip but successful — apart from me coming down with a weird but mercifully brief stomach bug on the way there and lying like a baby on the couch all day Sunday. Thankfully, I was well enough by Monday morning to do the rounds with Amos as planned, and we even got out to do a little putting before dinner that evening with Gigi and Grandpa!

The most important result was the MRI scan, which showed once again that everything remains clear and stable. Praise God! Thank you for continuing to pray for Amos in this very specific and ongoing way.

While we were there, Amos and I also packed in three other appointments. The first was with an endocrinologist, who gave us some very helpful feedback regarding whether and how we will move forward with Amos’s hormone therapy. It is fairly common for children who have had radiation in the brain to require growth hormones, and it looks possible or likely that Amos will also. He has a test here in England in a few weeks that will be the first step towards determining what that might look like. Please pray for clarity and consensus on the need for hormone therapy for Amos.

We also saw Amos’s eye surgeon and prism specialist. As mentioned in the previous post, Amos’s left eye began drifting outwards several weeks ago. This was something we hadn’t seen before, so we prioritized getting input from his vision team while in CA. He was given a new set of lenses for his glasses that will hopefully help bring the left eye back to center over the next few months. However, it is possible that if the lenses don’t do the trick, Amos may need to have another eye surgery, which would be his third. You may recall that previously Amos’s eyes were drifting inward, so we had two surgeries to “tension” his eye muscles to pull the eyes outwards and to center. It is possible that now the sixth nerve palsy that was causing the problem to begin with has suddenly improved, so that the previous surgeries are now over-correcting and dragging the left eye out. So the possible third surgery we might do would actually undo some of what was previously done. Please pray that Amos’s eyes would markedly improve over the next two months so that surgery is not necessary.

Our next trip will be in late November.

Love in Christ,

Will, Kelli, Amos, Luke, and Sam