GI appointment

Well we were at Children's again yesterday. This time was the GI doctor and he has confirmed that with his results from his PH Probe, he looks like he has acid reflux. So we are going to try giving him Previcid twice a day before breakfast and dinner. Hopefully this will help him and now he can enjoy food and even put on a few pounds.

As far as this weekend, Coltan and Cody are in a soccer tournament so I will be at the fields again. Hopefully it won't be to terribly hot.

Carson has had an asthma attack Wednesday night and I had to give him 6 breathing treatments from 10:30PM-5:30AM and then he flared up again on me last night and we were up from about 1AM-4AM. I would love some sleep. I have had him home now everyday except for Tuesday. We are going to get to the point were when he is finally better and it's time to go back to Kelley's, he will only want to stay with me. I love him so much but I need a break sometimes as well.

Anyways, I'm at work right now cutting payroll and then I'm going back home to him, Coltan, and Cody. I'm really going to try to download the pics. I have some really cute ones. Wish me luck!

Update on Carson

Well we made it through the PH Probe. It was a bit of a challenge. Carson got to Children's around 1:00 and got checked into his suite for the day and then they took him to the treatment room and put this wire down his nose. It goes all the way down to just above his stomach. He was not happy with that at all. Then they take him down to get an X-ray to make sure its was in the right place. Then after that, it was chase Carson around while holding a little machine to monitor his every swallow. He was put on a strict diet where he ate every 3 hours around the clock. Yes, we had to wake him up in the middle of the night as well. There were numbers on the machine and they had to be recorded every 30 minutes around the clock for 24 hours. Then, he had to lay flat from 9PM-9AM. Well, he didn't want to go to bed at 9PM so he fought us until about 10:30. When we finally got to take it out at 3:00PM on Monday. Carson has an appointment with the GI on the 29th of May and we will find out the results of his test then.

So after we were discharged from the hospital, Charlie and I took Carson straight to Wal Mart to buy him some of his favorite cars. We then went back to my house for a little bit and then decided to go grab dinner out. By the time we were home, Carson was running a fever. I took him to the doctor on Tuesday and Dr. Tarvin said his ears, throat, and lungs were fine and he just picked up a virus. So I didn't go to work until Friday because I had to ride it out with him. He is finally looking better and starting to eat a little bit.

Carson also went on Wednesday to the plastic Surgeon and he said that there is a foreign object in his chin. For those of you who don't know, last Halloween Carson was running down the hall into his room and fell and hit the corner of the baseboard just right. I took him up to Dr Tarvin's thinking he definitely needed stitches but because the incision was in the shape of a L, he decided on butterfly bandage. Well the boy won't slow down and somehow got a piece of dirt/pebble in there. So last November I had Dr Tarvin look and he said because he was such a little guy, he wanted Children's to look at him. It took 6 months to get in to see this Doctor. Anyways, they tried to schedule it down at Children's South and they anesthesiologist said no with his history of asthma, he won't touch him. He wants Carson to get his minor surgery done at the downtown Childrens. So they scheduled him for January but said that there would be lots of cancellations prior to that and I'm pretty much on a we call you, you get in here notice. So that makes me happy. The nurse also said that with Carson's out of contol asthma, he will now have to stay the night instead of being an outpatient. I guess I should be happy that they are just being safe with him.

Coltan and Cody have had a lot of soccer games this last week. They are trying to squeeze in all of the rainout games so we could finish the season. Coltan played Monday and Wednesday and Cody played Wednesday and Thursday. I cannot believe it but we have no soccer this whole weekend. The boys are in a tournament next weekend and then Cody starts his ODP in June and we will be traveling a lot for that. The ODP is a team that is formed for the whole state of Missouri. Only 18 kids from the whole state got chosen and we are honored that Cody is one of them. Coltan's dad is going to look into some soccer camps for him so he still can be active in soccer. The boys want to form a 3V3 team so if they do we will be traveling this summer for that. We will see. The cost of gas is going to be a huge decision maker.

Anyways, I have a lot of pictures but I haven't had time to download. Hopefully this weekend I can get a few of them up.

Nothing but Dr. appointments...

Well sorry it's been a while. My sweet little Carson decided to pull a couple of keys off of my laptop and they had to replace the whole keyboard.

Last Wednesday we took Carson down to Children's for his sweat test and by Friday we found out it was negative!!!! So at least we had a good start of the weekend for that news.

The Coltan and Cody are still going strong with soccer. We had several games over the weekend but they each had one cancelled due to the strong storms that came in Saturday evening.

By Monday, we had another Doctor appointment at Children's Mercy and this time it was to see the Pulmonary specialist. I took some pictures of him in the room and will download tomorrow when I get my computer back. We got there at 1:45 for his 2:00 appointment and she decided she wants him to see a Speech Pathologist for a swallow test and also wants him to do a PH Probe. The Speech Pathologist hasn't contacted me but we had to fill out a lot of info and mail it to her office. Once she gets it, she will look it over and contact us to schedule an appointment. As far as the PH Probe, we will be admitted into Children's Mercy South on Sunday and it is a 24 hour test. They will be putting wires down Carson's nose and he has to eat around the clock every 3 hours so they can monitor his swallowing and gag reflex. They said he will gag for a while until he gets used to it and the most important thing is keeping Carson's hands off of the wires. They said if he pulls the wires out they will have to start the whole test over. Please give us strength to help him leave the wires alone. So after the appointment we had to go down and draw blood. He, as everyone can probably figure out on their own, was not a happy camper at all! Charlie held him while they drew 4 vials of blood. The nurse called me the next day and said considering his situation his results looked okay. What does that mean exactly?

So, Monday night and Tuesday night Carson started running a low temp. Nothing over 101 but I knew something was going on. I was worried that he is finally picking something up from the hospital. It's only a matter of time. He started developing spots on his chin that looked like impetigo. He already had an appointment with Dr. Tarvin for his DTAP vaccination. When we went to his appointment Dr. Tarvin said we would wait until next week for his shot since he is running a temperature. I asked him to get Carson's blood work and explain to me what the pulmonary doctor wasn't telling me. He said he has an iron deficiency and we need to look into that a little more. He said his IGG was elevated but that has to due with the hemoglobin in your system and fighting off infections. He said it was probably a little high since he is fighting something right now. The fever is probably a side effect of his impetigo. He also said his IGE were way high. They were 276. Normally it is 0-51. He said that one traces amounts of asthma/allergies in your system. It just confirms that Carson has severe asthma and allergies. His White and Red blood cell counts looked good. They were in normal range which is what doctors look at for low immune systems, cancers, organ damage. So that was good news. We were all concerned that he had some type of immune deficiency which would have lead into major problems.

So a recap, he goes to Children's South and is admitted for at least 24 hours this Sunday, May 18. Then we go back to Children's downtown to see the plastic surgeon on May 21st about his scar under his chin from Halloween. This appt has actually been scheduled since mid November of last year. We thought a pebble or something is in there and Dr. Tarvin recommended a plastic surgeon since he is only 2. Then we see the GI specialist on May 29th to check out acid reflex. Back to the Asthma clinic on June 11th and we won't see the pulmonary specialist until Aug 5th. But if the PH Probe and speech pathologist come back normal, she is going to schedule another procedure on Carson where they will actually sedate him and put a scope down his throat to his lungs. They will put saline in his lung sac and draw it back up to see if he has bacteria or micro organisms in there which is causing so many flare ups. We won't know about that test until the first two are performed.

Now, I just want to tell Coltan how proud I was of him yesterday. He had his first middle school track meet and he did rather well. He ran the 100 meter and placed first. Then the did the 4x4 and he was the third one to relay and moved up from 5 to 3 and Campbell finished third. He ran two other races and placed 5th and 2nd. He did a really good job and I think he really enjoys track. He's already talking about taking it next year as well.

Chris got bumped on his shifts so he now will have Coltan and Cody on Sunday's and Monday's. I will have to get used to that. He has had them on Tuesday and Wednesday's for about 2 years now. Oh well. He will probably get to spend more time with them now since he has them on a weekend day.

I will try to post a little more tomorrow with some pictures of the boys and hopefully tomorrow's post won't be so long. I'm trying to cover the last 8 days in one so sorry it was a novel to read.

Take care.

Kaci

Soccer, Soccer, and more Soccer....

Well it has been another busy week with soccer. Thursday night Cody had a soccer game up north and they were winning 6-0 but we had to stop the game about 10 minutes early due to the lightening. So we rushed back down to Lee's Summit from that storm and found ourselves in the middle of the tornado warnings. On a good note, Cody scored 3 of the 6 goals!
My evening was jarred at 2:15AM with the next batch of storms going through. The only damage I could see was my screen door flew open and pounded on the porch light. I can feel lucky after seeing all the damage up north on the news.

Friday Coltan was in a tournament and they won the first game 2-0. Grandma Ann took him because it was really cold and windy and the game didn't start until 7:00 and I don't want anything to go wrong for Carson. So Cody went with them and then they stopped and ate dinner on the way home. They got home after 10 and Carson was already down for the night.

Saturday Cody had a game up north and Grandma Toni volunteered to drive that game. Cody won that game 4-0. Can anyone guess how many Cody scored??? 4! Yes he scored all of the goals. After that, they came back into Lee's Summit and I picked them up at 5:00 along with my mom and Paul and I drove the next round up north to Coltan's 7:15PM game. They ended up winning that game 5-2 and Coltan kicked a goal in just as the ref was blowing the whistle. The ref came over and gave Coltan a hug and said he was counting it!!! Coltan played really good. After that, I took my mom and Paul to a restaurant in North Town called Chapels. They have never been there and I wanted Paul to see all of the sports memorabilia. I think they really enjoyed all of the old team pictures and banners, helmets, and such. We got home pretty late and everyone was off to bed.

Sunday we had a game up north again at 2:00. I told mom I would drive and we could just hang out at Zona Rosa in between games. Coltan's team played another Lee's Summit team and lost 1-0. We had already qualified for the finals at 7:00PM. So after the game, we hung out at Zona Rosa and had lunch/early dinner and walked around. Carson was given all of his meds and I gave him his Abuteral for when he is outside and he actually had a great day considering he was outside for so long. I was afraid his allergies or asthma would flare up but knock on wood, he did great. Carson really enjoys his stroller and I think he had a lot of fun. So around 6:15 we headed back to the soccer fields and they ended up playing the same team that they lost to earlier in the day. We all played hard and had a lot of shots on the goal but they had a good goalie. At half time the score was 0-0. We got back on the field and 20 minutes into the half we finally scored. Then with about 5 minutes left of the game a boy from the other team came up and slide tackled Coltan from behind and took him out. He laid on the ground for a few and the ref ended up yellow carded the other player for an unsafe play. We finally ended that game 1-0. So, we took first. Way to go Coltan!!

Then again Monday, you guessed it, another soccer game. We played this time at least in Raytown. With the price of gas, you need a second job just for soccer runs. Coltan and Cody both played in this game and they won 4 or 5 to nothing. We came home, and I finally got to straighten up and wash something other than soccer uniforms. We had spaghetti for dinner and did some dishes and off to bed.

Today Chris has Coltan and Cody so I will get to think about other things besides soccer for the next 2 days.

On another note, Carson was sitting in my lap last night and I was rocking him. I record shows on my DVR and we were watching something and when the commercial came on he started hollering at me "troller mom, troller". It took me a second but I realized that he wanted me to get the controller and fast forward the commercials. He's just so darn smart.

We will be going to Childrens tomorrow to take the cystic fibrosis test at 10:00AM. So I hope that I will get a good nights sleep in the next few days. I haven't been sleeping very good praying for nothing but good news. As far as the other test, my doctors office has submitted the paperwork and she is just waiting to hear back from the GI and pulmonary offices for appointment times.

If everyone will just think positive and send some good vibes our way so Carson can come back with a clean bill of health on this test I would be very grateful.

Well now for the bad news....

So I took Carson to Childrens Mercy yesterday for his monthly asthma appointment. What I thought would be a normal follow up appointment and maybe change some of his meds around was anything but that. The Dr. went through a thorough history of Carson over the last 4 weeks and told me that we are going to give him a different dose of flovent 2 puffs twice a day instead of 2 puffs once a day. She is also going to prescribe Singular for him to take once a day and we will keep him on Zyrtec and his Abuteral inhaler for any time he is outdoors. She did state she was still concerned with him having 3 flare ups with asthma in one month with two becoming severe attacks. So after she did her consult with me she went to confer with the Asthma/Allergy director and the came back with the news.......Dr Downling stated that Carson has had way to many episodes and there has to be an underlying problem. He stated that there are a few concerns with Carson, 1. He has lost 2 pounds in a month. 2. Asthma flare ups are not under control. 3. He hasn't gained much wait at all and is considered underweight for his age without an explanation. 4. He gets choked a lot when he eats and drinks. 5. His bowel movements are not consistent. So, they are going to test him for Cystic Fibrosis.

So, I grasped the information as best as I could, took Carson to the car and cried all the way home. He is such a beautiful child. How could there be something so seriously wrong like that? It was all I could do to give him back to Kelley so I could get caught up at work. I just want to hold him all of the time and don't want to let him out of my sight. He is my baby and all I can think about is snuggling with him right now.

His appointment for testing is next Wednesday and they said it will take a few days for the results. They also want him to go to a pulmonary specialist so I will be making that appointment as well. Then they also want to look at the possibility of acid reflux. So that would be a GI specialist. There will be a lot of exhausting trips back and forth over the next 6 weeks.

Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely thankful that the doctors want to be thorough but this waiting game for the next two weeks is going to be a challenge.

As far as Coltan and Cody, nothing to exciting for them. They spent Tuesday and Wednesday with their dad and they will be home tonight. Cody has a soccer game at 6:00PM up north so I will be hustling around grabbing Carson and Cody to get them up north and figure out a way to get Coltan to his soccer practice at 6:15 in Lee's Summit.

The joys of being a busy mom....but I wouldn't trade them for anything!

Please keep Carson in your thoughts over the next couple of weeks until we find an answer. Please pray that he is and always will be healthy.