A Bean’s Life

It seems that all of my freaking out yesterday about the ultrasound wasn’t entirely illogical. They did find something unusual, luckily it is not a malignant growth lurking in there or anything horrendous. It seems that Gavin has quite the fluid collection pooling in his lower right abdomen.

It’s normal for VP shunt people to have fluid floating around in their abdomens, because the shunt puts it there, duh, so it makes sense, but this little collection is a bit different. Neurosurgery thought it was worth looking into, but it’s not  in their line of work so they passed us on to general surgery.

So I went to hospital this morning hoping that we would get an early discharge, but then was a bit deflated, and alarmed by this news. The thinking was that general surgery would perhaps like to do more imaging to figure out what this thing is doing, so we had to wait around to find out their thoughts.

In morning rounds we discussed discharge and that the follow-up will be with an upper GI series with Gastroenterology. This to rule out any structural issues of any kind. I can’t wait to convince Gavin to drink barium, that’s going to be great fun! Otherwise, the diagnosis is cyclic vomiting syndrome and we hope to try to control it with ondansetron. The gastro people may be able to shed some light on this condition too. Please. I hope.

Twiddling our thumbs, Beanie and I went to play some air hockey in Marnie’s Lounge and 10 minutes later got the call that general surgery had arrived to consult. I piggy-backed Gav back upstairs quickly, hoping the doctor wouldn’t leave by the time I got there. She turned out to be a friend we’d made in the elevator yesterday, and she and Gavin were soon chatting away. After examining him, she felt that no further action would be taken as he is so well, and surely someone with an abscess in their abdomen would be writhing on the floor in pain, not discussing the merits of various Angry Birds games. But we had to wait for her to consult the general surgery fellow.

After more hanging around we went back to the lounge, and almost immediately got a call to go back upstairs to meet the fellow. The jinx of hospital timing, yet again. Another quick piggyback ride and we were there, but she’d already gone, so we were stuck waiting in the room until she came back. When she did arrive, she backed up the previous doctor and told us we were leaving – yay! And that they only wanted to follow with another ultrasound in two months – yay, I guess.

So this little hot potato has now been passed over to Gastroenterology and we will see what happens. By the way, nobody thinks that the fluid has anything to do with the vomiting. It was just a little extra gift, so to speak.

Long story short, we are home, all is as well as can be expected and Gav will be back at school next week after recuperating over the weekend.

Thanks to everyone for your lovely messages of support. It means so much!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 19th, 2013 at 8:41 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.