This poor kid (and his parents) just can’t catch a break. Here we go for another hospital stay. But before I get to that, I should probably fill you in with some back story in case you haven’t read the First Trip to the ER post. Even if you did read it, there is some additional information included here.
When James was in the hospital after Thanksgiving because of respiratory distress, another issue that James had was a very distended stomach. You can click on the link to read about stomach distension in depth if you wish, but in brief, James’ belly looked very bloated. At the time, the doctors thought that it was a result of James inhaling air into his stomach as he was gasping for breath because of the respiratory distress. They decided to stop his normal feeds and give him IV fluids until his respiratory issues improved. As his breathing got better, they slowly reintroduced his feeds. They took some x-rays just to be sure there wasn’t any sort of blockage, but everything looked fine from a gastrointestinal (GI) perspective.
That hospital stay was about ten days. After we got him home, we hoped things would go back to “normal”, but James was having some feeding issues. For some reason he would get cranky during his feeds and we didn’t know why. We took James to see a gastrointestinal doctor that was recommend, but that seemed like a waste. You can read about that experience here.
We managed to make it through Christmas without any issues other than the crankiness during feeds. The day after Christmas we went to see the pediatrician for routine vaccinations, and some blood work.
This past Friday, we noticed a yellowish liquid was coming out of James’ g-tube so we went to see our pediatrician and he ended up having James admitted to the hospital. Not again!
They did an upper GI with small bowel follow-through. For this test, they put some barium concoction into James’ stomach through his g-tube and watched how the barium moved through his gastrointestinal tract with a fluoroscope. Everything looked fine and things were flowing as they should.
Next, they did an ultrasound of his abdomen and there was a concern about his gallbladder and wanted to do another ultrasound in the morning. The follow-up ultrasound showed James had a stone in his gallbladder, but as long as it remained in the gallbladder it should not be causing him any pain. The stone would only be causing James pain if or when it gets lodged in the bile duct thereby blocking movement of bile from the gallbladder.
So, after a couple of days in the hospital, and a few tests, we didn’t have any answers as to what was causing his discomfort with his feeds. This is very frustrating!
About a month ago we took James to see his neurologist because James had started doing this weird thing. We call it a “quirk”, because we don’t know what it is. We tried to explain them as best we could to the neuro. James basically throws his arms up and his head jerks from left to right. Sometimes he does this once or twice and then stops. Other times he has several in a row before he stops. The neuro thought they might be infantile spasms, so we did an EEG, but according to the EEG results, they were not infantile spasms. He happened to have a couple of these quirks in while we were in the hospital and Stacy was able to get one on video and showed it to the GI doc to see if they might be GI related. Her opinion was that the “spasms” were a classic sign of reflux, put him on an anti-reflux medication, and proceeded to discharge James from the hospital. She didn’t feel like there was a need to keep him in the hospital, but did want us to follow up with her.
So, we are back at home now. Fingers crossed things get better.
