Josh turned 14 this year!
Josh was selected to go on a dream hunt near Del Rio in December 2009, thanks to TNT Outdoor Explosion and Cast of Dreams. He shot his very first deer, a big buck. He even made the front page of the Del Rio newspaper the next day.A note from Josh's mom about Josh and how he was diagnosed:
Everyone thought Josh was perfectly healthy and normal when he was younger.
His first problems were: sweating more than normal - which he's done since he was a baby,
failing hearing screenings - as early as 3 years of age (they said the trouble was in the high frequencies and he can hear most normal speech just fine), and a learning disability (discovered in 1st grade when he could not seem to grasp basic math and reading). Otherwise, Josh was active, rarely sick and usually quite happy.
It wasn't until he was 8-and-a-half that we discovered there was something seriously wrong with him. He'd had a throat infection and finished a course of antibiotics. He would get up and go to school ok, but come home and fall asleep on the couch and not be able to wake back up and stay awake. He was missing out on playing with his friends, going to a favorite church function, and he wasn't eating much. This lasted a few days. I thought he was just still recovering from that throat infection. But after having a bath to try to wake him enough to finish his overdue homework, still wrapped in a bath towel, he collapsed in front of me.
I got him to his bed, realized he was very hot, took his temperature and found he had a fever of 103. I gave him motrin, got him dressed and took him to a minor emergency clinic - thinking he likely needed more antibiotics. Instead, the doctor found his blood oxygen level was very dangerously low (50 percent and it should be 97-100 percent). They called an ambulance that rushed him to the hospital. The next morning, he went into respiratory failure and had to be resuscitated 5 times before getting him onto a ventilator. But they finally got it right and saved him. He spent the next 2 weeks in the ICU. While there, he lost feeling and movement in his left side and had a seizure. But powerful steroids and lots of IV's seemed to work and he got better soon.
Doctors did not find the real cause of his problems until months later and another hospitalization. He relapsed while at a Sunday Church Service with the rest of the family. Again he was rushed back to the hospital. After several more tests, doctors found the diagnosis they were looking for. His diagnosis was a combination of a few things: central hypoventilation (a part of the brain causes the body not to ventilate properly).... because he did not have that particular problem from birth, they called it Late-Onset. But his body was not producing cortisol as it should either. An endocrinologist said he also had hypothalamic dysfunction. After doing research about his condition, doctors made a decision which changed everything.
One of the doctors came out and talked to me privately. she said that Josh will not be able to breathe on his own ever again. That meant Josh will need to be hooked up to a ventilator 24 hours a day. But in order to do that, he had to have a tracheostomy tube inserted in his windpipe. To do so, doctors had to cut a small hole in his throat before the tube can be fitted in place.
You can read more about Josh at his mom's web site: CLICK HERE or click on the pictures above.
