Back the same day

Blaise seems determined sometimes to keep things more interesting than we'd really like. After almost a full week of basically no scary/bloody diapers, what did we see (repeatedly) late last night and this morning? You got it: extremely scary/bloody diapers. Obviously no one wants me to go into detail, but suffice it to say that Erin and I have acquired a fairly high freak-out threshold for this sort of thing by now and we were both thoroughly rattled.

So we called our NP at Children's and hung up the phone pretty certain we were going to be re-admitted. I wrapped up things at work as quick as I could, reserved a Zipcar for the day, and drove home while Erin got Blaise ready to go with a bag full of toys, books, and all the necessities. Thankfully, we didn't have to go through the ED. We went straight upstairs to see her old friends in the CAIR clinic and made visits to outpatient blood draw and radiology after giving a quick history upstairs. We kinda figured we were looking at having to go NPO (no food) in preparation for another colonoscopy and weren't thrilled about the idea, but what do you do? Blood is scary...wicked scary, as they say in Boston, and ruling out or addressing anything serious is critical when you've got a sudden change like this.

The blood draw came back looking totally normal...white counts were fine, red counts were fine. No problem. The X-ray? We started getting worried because the "2nd look" they told us to wait for seemed to be taking a while. Very hard not to have flashbacks to the ultrasound

we had at 20 weeks along...we both have a very acute sense of how long "2nd looks" should and shouldn't take, and this felt like it was veering into the realm of too long. Happily, we were freaking out over basically nothing. Well, not actually nothing, but not anything surprising or outside the realm of what we've seen before. Her GI doctor could see inflammation in the sigmoid (the bottom bit of the colon) which is very likely to be the source of the blood. Why is it inflamed? Her blood labs, while in normal range, also showed evidence of eosinophils,which are the kind of white blood cells you see following an allergic reaction. What does that add up to? More or less exactly what we saw a little while ago, just with worse bleeding last night.

Maybe bananas are the culprit...maybe something else. Either way, she looks great, played and napped pretty well despite the impromptu trip across the river, and her team thinks just holding off on the new solids may do the trick for now.

A bit scary, a bit frustrating, but Blaise is sleeping in her bed right now and we both feel a lot better for that. Atka the polar bear is always ready for duty, but it's nice that he (and us) get to hang out with her at home. What does this all mean in the long term? A little hard to say unfortunately, but our doctor tells us that babies tend to grow out of this even if you don't ever find a root cause. This may mean we have to move a lot slower than we'd like, but Blaise has done well with slow and steady before.

Speaking of doing well, one very nice thing to come out of all this (and our previous return visits) is that everyone there is very happy with how she's growing and how good she looks overall. We had a request for some statistics on our last post, and we are of course happy to oblige: Blaise weighs approximately 0.407 slugs and is just under 0.373 Smoots long (that's also 2.058 x 10^-17 parsecs for you astronomically-minded readers). It's great to see such progress!

OK, today was a bit stressful and scary, but yesterday was great fun. Blaise got to hang out all day with us and our friend Kate, who went with us on another fun trip to the local playground. Just like on our first adventure, the swing was a big hit:

We thought the slide might be equally fun, but I get the impression Blaise was less certain about it: