Amazingly enough, as soon as I finally wrote about Lime waking up at 4 a.m. consistently, he stopped doing it. And, the likely cause literally emerged, namely a new molar. Of course, that means that there are three more molars still lurking in various places in those cute little jaws. But I try not to dwell on that. Right now, I just luxuriate in the concept of sleeping in until 5:15. It is amazing what a difference it makes for one's general outlook on life to have the first digit on the clock be a 5 when waking up.We also had Lemon's 4 year check-up with the regular pediatrician. He has grown another 6/10ths of an inch just since June, bringing him up to the 77th percentile in height. As I had expected based on our home scale, he'd lost some weight, although thanks to our bringing his tube feeds back up to 3.5 cans a night he's only down 6 oz on the summer. The fact that a 6 oz weight loss is even something you discuss at a pediatrician appointment kills me, but discuss it we did, and of course we'll be seen at the CF clinic next month anyhow for another weigh-in, and by then I imagine we'll have made up all the ground that we lost over the summer, weight-wise. Where this will put us in our quest to have Lemon consume more than 100 calories per day by mouth, who knows.
After the visit with the pediatrician, we went down to the lab to have blood drawn for yet another set of liver enzymes, and what do you know, still high, just like they have been every time Lemon's ever had them measured. So, the pediatrician scheduled us for a liver ultrasound and recommended a follow-up with GI. I took Lemon to the ultrasound this morning (one advantage of his current attitude about food: could care less about being allowed nothing by mouth after midnight). He was pretty apprehensive about getting on the table, even though we'd talked about the ultrasound a lot in the days prior. But once he got up on the table and discovered that it was true that the technician was just going to put goop on his belly and press on him with a wand, he was perfectly content to watch the cartoons they were showing on a TV while lying completely inert. So, they got very good images. Of course, the technician can't tell you what the images mean, you have to wait for a doctor to officially interpret them.
So, when we got home, I called the hospital to schedule the GI consult. The CF clinic had recommended a particular person, so I asked for him, and was told his next available was October 13. That seemed like sort of a long time to wait for the results of an ultrasound, so I asked about the first available generally, and it turns out that was October as well. So I went with the guy the CF clinic recommended, but I was kind of annoyed that we would have to potentially wait 6 weeks to find out the ultrasound results.
But, I should have known better. Our pediatrician has turned out to be the unexpected hero of our story several times, including this one--where he once again called me personally at the end of his work day to let me know that the results of the ultrasound were completely normal. He wants us to keep the GI consult just to get another opinion on the situation (since those liver tests are still high), but at least there doesn't appear to be anything structurally wrong. Phew! Now we can just focus on the important business of enjoying our last week of summer before school starts next week.
