3 Rounds of Drama

I feel like I’m about four eons behind in the whole documenting-our-lives bit.  Maybe five.  I’ve lost count.

We had such a busy week, but now that it’s done, we’re finally on countdown for our trip to Florida!  Wahoo!!!  This is our little travel-buddy, Sawyer (can you believe that hair???).  Cuteness will abound, I know, but we’ve had discussions with the girls regarding their ability to smile.  Together.  At the same time.  Every time we took out the camera this day, one girl would start crying, and the other would follow suit.  Not such a good thing. 

Wednesday, Piper went back to audiology.  I was really hoping that she’d do better this time (she really seems to hear all the sounds they put through the speakers, but she keeps failing the eardrum part…).  Last time, we were in the booth for about 45 minutes to an hour.  If she didn’t cooperate with one sound at one frequency, they’d try a couple times to see if she was just being stubborn (which, really, she was quite often).  This week, we were called back, a few minutes late, even, talked for a minute or two, sat in the sound booth, did the eardrum thing, talked for a while, checked out, walked to the car, and were out of the garage within 35 minutes of our appointment time.  I was not impressed.  I really don’t think that they tried, at all, in the booth.  I was really miffed because I expect more than that from Children’s.  And we got more than that the last time at the different campus.  Anyway, her recommendation was that we go back and see our pediatrician to explore if there were any medical reasons (ie ear infections) that could have caused the eardrum mess, and to go back and see them about four weeks after we saw the ped.  Then, if she still failed there, they’d send us to ENT and probably schedule an ABR.  I looked at the lady and asked her if she had any idea how many times we’d seen our pediatrician (including just four days before).  The she admitted that we could probably just go straight to ENT, “but it’ll take you a long time to get in”.  My thought is, if it’s going to take that long to get in, why am I wasting my time getting in with the pediatrician, going through another one of these, and then waiting to see ENT???  I was not thrilled.  At the end, the audiologist also said, under her breath, that they couldn’t get the probe in her ear very well, and it may just be that her canal is too small for the probe itself (yes, one side is smaller than the other).  Don’t get me wrong- if there’s something up in the hearing department, I want to know about it so that we can fix it.  But I don’t want to wait another eight months trying to figure it out, either.

So that was Round 1 of drama last week.

Round 2 is a continuation of the breathing/coughing drama from the week before.  Remember how we started Piper back on Prevacid to see if it would help out her cough junk?  Well, Thursday was the last day I could give myself the okay to use the well-it-takes-a-few-days-for-the-Prevacid-to-work excuse, so when she woke up coughing and sounding terrible on Friday morning, I called the doctor.  I chatted with the nurse for a few minutes and decided that, since it was a long weekend, to go ahead and take her back in just to be on the safe side.  So they took some chest x-rays (which literally only added about 10 minutes onto our visit- I was amazed) and checked her pulse-ox, just to be sure.  They said that they could see some swelling in the smaller parts of the airway (or something like that?), but nothing that’s surprising (she said it was exactly what she was expecting to see), and no pneumonia or anything, so that’s good.  And she was satting at 99-100 still, so that’s good.  We went ahead and put her on the Flovent inhaled steroid for a few weeks to see if it helps.  Downside to that is that it takes about 10-14 days to really work, which seems like an eternity.  We’re praying that it works!!!  I talked to the ped about our audiology appointment, and she groaned with us.  So, we decided to contact ENT and try to get an emergent appointment based on the breathing issues, and talk about the hearing at the same time.  Perfect.  So, we see them after we get back from Florida next month, instead of several months down the road. 

If you think we were done with the drama for the week, you’d be wrong.  Somewhere in the middle of all this, Round 3 started when we put Piper back on whole milk after our conversation with the ped last week.  She was on it a grand total of a day-and-a-half before she started screaming in pain.  I took her off the whole and put her back on 2%, and within 12 hours, she was fine.  Fine.  <<sigh>>.  Who knows what’s going on there.  Milk intolerance doesn’t make sense since she can handle everything else.  Really seems to be the fat.  We called to get the GI appointment, and they weren’t going to be able to see us for about three months.  But then they realized that Piper’s only a year old, so we got in in a month.  And then the nurse called back (in the middle of the screaming episode) and said that we could get in on the 7th.  As in this coming week.  So, that’ll be one more thing out of the way. 

I’m not really sure what happened to the “we don’t have to see you until she’s 15 months old” bit from the doctor.

I’m considering requesting that they say nothing regarding the timing of our next appointment next time- I’m fairly certain that in her little baby mind, three months just seems way too long, and is creating nasty ways of getting back.  And I am so over it.