So Riley has had a few more doctor visits in last week. She saw her pediatrician on Friday and weighed in at 21 lbs 15 oz. This is almost a five pound weight gain from a month ago. I plotted it on her growth chart, and it looks crazy...an 11 month period that is totally flat, then a spike of 25% in such a short time. She also saw her Ped. GI doctor who was happy with her progress, and released her from his care and gave us some feeding advice. That's the good news.
The not-so-good news is she is back to having breath-holding spells. Her neurosurgeon predicted those would not stop, and said they were unrelated to the brain tumor. Great. She hadn't had any in three weeks following surgery, so I was optimistic...thinking they must be connected somehow. Nope, they're back. Something makes her upset, starts crying, gets worked up and cries harder, freezes on end-expiration, and does not take a breath for 15-20 seconds until she turns blue and starts to pass out. When she finally relaxes she wakes back up and gasps for breath. After having 3 on Monday we took her in for a check-up on Tuesday (she was originally scheduled to go on Thursday for a follow-up with the neurosurgery team). They said she was doing well as far as recovery from surgery, but referred her to another neurologist on the team who examined her on Wednesday and thought everything was okay. The question has been whether or not she is a having any kind of seizure activity during these episodes, which can sometimes accompany the breath holding spells. We were suspicious a couple times that they looked different, and it made us wonder, but the doctor felt like what we were describing was typical for breath holding spells and not seizure.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Doctor visits, turning blue - just the usual.
Posted by Jaron at 2:02 PM
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4 comments:
Prayed for Riley's continuing recovery and for all of you again this morning. Then I saw this update... so happy for the weight gain... praise the Lord! Sorry to hear about the continued breath-holding spells... we'll be praying about that. We love you all very much!
I know it must be difficult to have setbacks like this especially when everything seemed to be going to great. I hope that the spells will resolve themselves on thier own. My cousin did the same thing at Riley's age and I remember how alarming it was.
Until you told me about this, I had never heard of kids holding their breath until they fainted. Seriously, I thought that if you held your breath long enough, your brain just makes you stop holding it. Now I know!
I was glad to hear about how Riley is doing better. The breath holding thing reminds me of Tammy Coate's (from Central) son (I can't remember which one). When I was going to babysit once, she told me that might happen, and I was freaked out the whole time. If you want to try to get in touch with her, she might have some insight for you, having gone through it with her child. Just a thought. Blessings!
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