Thursday, March 24, 2011

Denver: Part Two

I originally had planned to go into detail about all of our various doctor appointments and hospital visits, but then it dawned on me that most of you reading this probably don't care one, tiny ounce about the medical stuff.  So instead, I will start off with our airplane ride down to Denver.

I have a deep phobia for flying.  Just stepping foot into an airport gives me severe anxiety.  I will often look up in the sky at an airplane and think to myself, "those poor souls...they have no idea they are about to die".  I'm fairly certain that any airplane I see, or heaven forbid have to fly in, will without a doubt come crashing to the ground at any given second.  I. Hate. Flying!  Moving along, our flight down to Denver was really nothing too out of the ordinary, except for the million or so bumps we encountered along the way.  Turbulence is something I only overreact to when it occurs during takeoff, and fortunately the only bumps during this flight occurred mid-flight and during our landing, so I was able to hold it together rather well.  I still don't like it, but I can tolerate it...mostly.  Cale, on the other hand, thought turbulence was the greatest thing since sliced bread!  Each and every bump would without a doubt cause fits of giggles and squeals of pure delight!  He quickly endured himself to the flight attendants and those sitting around us.  Alex, however, whom has never gotten motion sick, started to turn green.  I've never actually witnessed someone's face turn green due to nausea, but Alex was definitely a different shade of color than I'm used to.  He had to reach for the little bag a few times but thankfully never needed to use it.  Good times.

From here on out Cale will definitely have the mindset of the more bumps, the better.  And when you ask him what Mommy does on the airplane, he covers his face with his hands.  I didn't think I actually went to that extreme but apparently my instincts take over when I'm paralyzed in fear.

And now for the brief summary of what happened while we were down in Denver.  My initial assumption of our stay there was that Cale would be admitted into a hospital and receive 24/7 observation and care.  It turned out to be just many scheduled doctor appointments which left us with a lot of free time, and that turned out to be absolutely marvelous.  Our first appointment of the week started off with a bang.  During our chat with the GI doctor, Cale started doing his thing and threw up right in front of him.  Perfect!  Someone is finally going to see the reason behind us traveling all this way!  Throwing up is very typical for him but this time he threw up blood.  Not typical.  The GI doctor talked with us a little more and decided to admit him into the ER just to make sure nothing really serious was going on.  That ER visit turned into a overnight stay at Denver Children's Hospital.  They monitored him through the night and we continued with our scheduled appointments the following day.  He was due for an upper endoscopy and a colonoscopy which meant he would be under anesthesia for those procedures.  It's never easy to watch your baby be put to sleep.  After about an hour the doctor came out and showed us the pictures he had taken, which all appeared to be perfectly normal, and then told us we would have to wait through the weekend to receive the results from the biopsies.  Also, they could see no cause for the blood in his vomit.  At this point our hearts are heavy because we hate to hear the word normal.  Cale has got to be the most abnormal normal person I have ever met.  The rest of the week was filled with appointments with an allergist, therapist, and geneticist.  The allergist agreed with us that whatever was going on with Cale was not due to an allergy and so he cancelled the two skin prick tests that were scheduled.  The therapist mainly talked with Alex and me, making sure that we had the resources back home to successfully deal with the emotions that go along with having a child with special needs.  The geneticist appointment resulted in doing more genetic testing and confirming that the two MRI's Cale has had were in fact normal.  No surprise, the radiologists agreed his MRI's were normal.  The genetic tests that were run will take about two months to receive the results.  So...we wait.

So you might be wondering what on earth did we travel all the way to Denver, CO for to learn nothing.  I have very mixed emotions about how our time down there was spent, and I will go into more detail about that in my next and final post, but there are a few things we did learn that were helpful.


  1. The pH level in his stomach is very low, meaning he is very acidic.  This shouldn't be the case because he's been on medicine since he was six months old to lower his acidity.  So, the doctor increased the dose of his acid reflux medicine and added a new one to hopefully help with the pain of having acid reflux.
  2. The biopsies that they took during his scopes showed that he does not have the diagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis, which the GI doctor we saw in Seattle had initially given him.  
  3. Whatever is causing Cale so much pain and causing him to vomit is not due to an allergy!  A last minute skin prick test, however, showed that Cale is allergic to egg which means that when he does start to eat things again we probably shouldn't start out with scrambled eggs.
So there you have it.  The only changes we made coming home was an increased dose in his medicine and a new medicine to help with acid reflux.

More to come!...

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