Update on Ben

Here's the latest news:
Ben is still in the hospital in Kuwait. He passed the two stones he had over the weekend, but was still in a lot of pain. They did another CT Scan yesterday (this one with contrast dye) to see if the pain was possibly caused by something going on with his intestines. They found out two thing. 1) He has another kidney stone. We'll be going to the dr here in Japan when he gets back to see if we can figure out what's causing these. It's kinda ridiculous how many he gets and how often he gets them. 2) There is some swelling of the colon on his left side. So the next step is they give him some stuff to completely clean him out this afternoon/evening and they do a colonoscopy tomorrow. Neither which sounds fun to me. Right now they are thinking it's either Colitis (an infection in his colon) or Chrone's Disease (google it because I don't understand it enough to explain it yet). If it's colitis, they can continue treating him in Kuwait with antibiotics and such and he should be good in a couple weeks. If it's Chrone's Disease (which we are thinking it might be), they will do all they can for him in Kuwait, but will probably end up sending him up to Germany and then back to Japan. It's been thought before that he has Chrone's but for some reason it was ruled out. Not sure when or by who, but it's been a possibility before nonetheless. So he may end up coming home early. It wouldn't be much earlier since they'll be home in about a month anyway (sometime between Aug 21 - 25 are the dates we have right now). So yeah. That's what we know right now. They've got him on Prednisone and something else to help with the pain and everything. It doesn't take the pain away, but makes it more tolerable. But until they do the colonoscopy tomorrow we don't know much else. It's nice to have an idea of what's going on though. And we're both glad he finally went to the dr. He wasn't going to go, and just kept putting it off because he thought it was just kidney stones, but the pain finally got to the point where he had to go. I wish he wasn't so stubborn when it comes to stuff like that, but then I'm the same way so I really shouldn't be saying anything. We are seriously going to have the most stubborn kids on the planet. :P But anyway, as soon as we know anything else I'll update again.