Under pressure

I mentioned in my last entry that Magnus's weight had been a bit stagnant earlier this week. Then, when we went to weigh him last night, we found that he had lost 50 grams since the last time he'd been weighed, 2 days earlier. There were a few reasons we could think of that might be responsible for this fluctuation, but his cardiologist had told us to get in touch with her if he lost weight, and so I dutifully e-mailed her last night.

She e-mailed me right back, and said that she was concerned about the weight loss, and that she wanted us to come in to the cardiology office this morning. She told us that we might have to put his feeding tube back in, and that we should come to the cardiology appointment prepared for him to be admitted to the hospital, although she said that she thought he probably wouldn't. Needless to say, we were both pretty stressed out.

We arrived at the cardiology office at 10:15 for our appointment, and sat in the waiting room for an hour. Then we finally got to see the cardiologist, who checked Magnus out, talked to us for a while, and then left the room to speak to a pediatric gastroenterologist. When he came back, he told us that he thought Magnus might have something called pyloric stenosis, and that we'd have to take him for an abdominal ultrasound to check it out. I asked what the treatment was for pyloric stenosis, and the answer was surgery. "Very minor surgery" the cardiologist said, but still daunting to us.

The earliest ultrasound appointment they could get us was at 2 p.m., and Magnus had finished the bottle we'd brought with us, so we drove home, got a new bottle, quickly ate some lunch, and then came back for the ultrasound. It was in the same facility where I'd gone for all my zillions of ultrasounds when I was pregnant, and we were actually in the same room where I'd had my 20-week ultrasound when they first detected Magnus's heart defect.

The ultrasound was pretty horrible--Magnus SCREAMED throughout the whole thing. I think maybe the technician was pressing down too hard with the probe, because after she was done, the radiologist came in and scanned him again, and he was fine for her.

Anyway, thankfully, the results of the scan were negative! The consensus is that he just had a couple of bad days and that we just need to keep plugging away at the feeding.

We'd left the house for his first appointment this morning at 9:45 a.m., and by the time we got home it was nearly 4. And all this because he lost less than 2 ounces. It really drove home the fact that there's a lot of pressure on us in taking care of this little guy. A minor weight loss resulted in hours of medical appointments, a thoroughly unpleasant test, and the threat of a hospital stay. But thankfully, it all turned out OK.