It’s been awhile since we had a week full of appointments, but that is what it turned out to be for Lindy Lou-Who.
Tuesday started bright and early with a renal ultrasound to check on the size of her kidneys. I will say this is the first year she has NOT had to have the horrible VCUG and that in itself was wonderful. Just a completely different feel to the whole yearly kidney check-up. The ultrasound technician has been doing ultrasounds on Lindy since she was in the NICU so it’s always great to see her. She is great with Lindy and always lets Lindy ‘help.’ Lindy was just slightly apprehensive when we walked in the room and asked, “Will you hold my hand if I’m scared?” She was fine as soon as she remembered how easy the ultrasounds are. We left the ultrasound and headed for the appointment with the nephrologist. The nephrologist is one of the funniest doctors we have. He is good with Lindy too. Unfortunately he gave us the not so wonderful news that her right kidney hasn’t grown in 2 years. ugggg. Thankfully her left kidney is growing at the appropriate rate. As long as her left kidney continues to grow and function well, she will be fine and will live a normal life. People live with one kidney all the time. But still, I hate that it’s not growing and probably not doing much work. It will always make me a little nervous that something could go wrong with her one good kidney. To check to see if the good kidney was working well she had to give a urine (meaning mommy had to catch pee in a cup – good times) and blood sample. She rocked the blood sample. She winced and said ‘Ouch’ but never cried while they drew her blood. The lady who does all the lab draws is good at her job and works with all pediatric patients so she knows what she is doing.
We left the hospital and we ran a couple errands and then we went to pick Will up from school. We headed to gymnastics and had a normal class. We left gymnastics and we dropped Will off at Uncle Ed’s house and then I took Lindy to a hearing appointment. I got excited when her left tympanogram showed the big curve and was then oh so disappointed when the right one was flat. Flat means fluid in her ear. uggg. I was not completely shocked because she had been sick with congestion and a cough for most of the fall. She had really only been better since around Thanksgiving. We attempted a booth test but she wasn’t paying attention all that well. It had been a long day. The test showed her hearing was the same in the left ear and down a bit in the right ear – because of the fluid. I’m not too worried because she has always cleared the fluid by herself, it just means more follow-up appointments to make sure her hearing isn’t actually worse.
Thursday afternoon we had an ENT appointment – which worked well since they had just found out she had fluid in her ear on Tuesday. It was a follow-up appointment to talk about her vocal cords and some recent testing she had done. The main purpose was to talk about a vocal cord paralysis surgery that our doctor is now doing on small kids – it’s called Laryngeal Nerve Reinnervation for Vocal Fold Paralysis. Our doctor is the first person to do it on children. He’s done it on kids as young as 3. We had a very in-depth conversation about the surgery but we are still not sure about doing it. We go back in 6 weeks and he is going to put a scope down her nose and watch the vocal cord. This will give us a huge piece of information. He dose not think the vocal cord is moving, but he will make sure. If there is any movement then we will NOT be doing any surgery. If there is no movement at all then we will continue to consider the surgery. Decisions, decisions. She would never regain a full voice but every child that has had this done says their voices have improved. It’s just hard to make a decision on elective surgery for your child. He also checked her ears and did see fluid in her right ear. In fact he said it was mucousy looking, meaning it was somewhat infected. He went ahead and gave her an antibiotic since it’s been about two weeks since she had been better and it was still there. She hasn’t complained about her ear hurting so I was surprised about that. She has only had maybe 2 ear infections in her life. He also got a chunk of ear wax out of her ear – which Lindy didn’t much appreciate. But we need to make new ear molds and the audiologist didn’t want to make them because she was afraid of pushing the wax even farther down in there.
The flu has started running rampant in town and I hated that we were at the hospital so much this week. My premature babies tendencies are back in full swing and we are hand sanitizing like crazy these days. Just trying to keep those yucky germs away.
Thursday evening the kids had choir practice and Friday evening we met some folks from our Sunday school class for dinner and Christmas shopping. Our church is having a Christmas party for the UMAR residents in our town and our class shopped for them.
Saturday we had a couple different plans fall through but we did end up with an impromptu gingerbread house decorating party with Aunt Jamie and Molly – and Ed (although he didn’t decorate any houses). They came over Saturday evening for pizza and then we decorated houses. Lynn bought us these plastic houses last year that are reusable. We constructed them and frosted them and let the kids decorate them. Lindy tried helping frost but that didn’t work real well. She just got herself covered in frosting. The kids loaded up their gingerbread house with candy. It might buckle from the weight of all that candy! They had fun, that’s for sure.
Today we had church and tonight we had our Christmas musical at church. The kids sang at one of their many holiday choir performances. They are singing a lot in the next couple weeks! Except Lindy didn’t really do much singing – she did perform though. She also swung her arms, pulled her arm out of her sleeve, and made lots of funny faces. We will be working on more singing and less playing in the next week so maybe she’ll sing at the next performances. Will sang very well and he rang the bells with much spirit. His face lights up when he sees his bell color on the card. He has the most interesting bell ringing style out of the group. Drew described it best by saying it looks like the bells are on fire and he’s trying to put them out. His arms are usually outstretched and he rings with gusto. It’s pretty darn cute and funny! We enjoyed some refreshments at the bar afterwards – the kitchen bar that is. Right Pat J??? The cookies and hot chocolate were delicious!
Now for the pictures I took this week.
One of her many Christmas shirts. Seriously, I think she has either 14 or 15! 
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