Impromptu clinic visit

We had been back and forth a few times on the phone with our nurse practitioner at Children's about the blood in Blaise's diapers. Because her care is overseen by a team of three doctors from three different services, this ends up being a major project for the NP as she pages all of them, consults and then tries to get a coherent plan. So we decided this morning that it might be better for us to head into clinic this afternoon.

This was a very good idea. Clinic can be a little overwhelming because all the doctors show up at once, but it's also very handy to get all of them in one room. The blood issue is, in the words of one doc, an annoyance, not a threat. He's right: it's not affecting her blood counts or her behavior or any other indicators of general health. Blaise is growing, healthy and happy. We still need to get this under control, so here we go. New plan: Steroid enemas every night for a week. If that doesn't help, we'll take her off the vitamins for a week, since there is a coincidence of restarting the vitamins and the recurrence of blood. If that doesn't help, we'll go for a systemic anti-inflammatory med. It's good to have a plan, especially one that makes a lot of sense to us and involves some waiting and manipulating individual variables. We like manipulating individual variables. Unfortunately, our food adventures are on hold until we get this sorted out. Blaise can still have rice cereal, but no fruits or veggies for a while.

Our favorite part of any visit to Children's is swinging back by 10 East to say hello to Blaise's old nurses and let them ooh and ahh over how much she's grown (currently at 12 lbs, 6 oz). We found out while we were up there that one of our long-term roomies had her ostomy closed today. Yay! We were also a little sad to see that some of our roommates and neighbors are either still in or back in. We hope they're all doing well and that they can get home as soon as possible. After stopping at 10 East, we headed over to the next unit to say hello to a friend from grad school whose daughter had surgery earlier this week to correct scoliosis. We figured a cute baby might help cheer her up a bit. We wish speedy recoveries all around.