March 8, 2005
Yah, uhm, last night… Ok, here’s how it happened. I was holding the Hbomb, stroking his blond locks (an overstatement) and suddenly I came upon a raised spot on his head. A large, squishy raised spot on his head. In fact, it was as if a small waterbed had taken up residence on the top of his head. Right there where the back of the head starts to slope down to the flat back of the head, was a three inch wide horizontal waterbed. It freaked me out.
“This isn’t normal,” I told Jen. She agreed. “We need to call the doc.”
She agreed again, and called the doc. We got through and the person on the other end (are they medically trained? hard to tell) asked the same old questions. Is he sleeping? Does he eat? Did he have any head trauma? Do you have it out for him? Ok, I made that last one up.
She told us that she would have someone contact us. We waited. I turned on the Simpsons. Thank you SImpsons for wasting the half hour it took for someone to f’n call us back.
Same questions. Finally: “Well, you could go to the emergency room (THE EMERGENCY ROOM?) and wait for4 to 6 hours subjecting him to all sorts of ailments, or you could wait to see your pediatrician tomorrow.”
We choose the latter.
Our pediatrician doesn’t come in on Tuesdays until 2pm, so we waited. The escorts us the room and asks us about the bump on his head. It’s more than that, we explain. It’s fluid. She doesn’t check, kinda shrugs it off, weighs HBomb (12.4lb!) and leaves. The doc arrives goes over the Zantac first. We tell her it seems to be working. We’ve switched Hayes to the easy to digest tapioca based formula. He’s been sleeping a ton more. No longer cries when he poops. Etc.
“So what’s wrong with his head?” she asks
“There seems to be… uh… it seems like… kinda like…. well, you should just feel it.” I tell her, swinging Hayes into her reach. She washes her hands and touches.
“Oh!” she exclaims.
After the did he have head truama, is he sleeping, is he alert, does he eat discussion, she decides that the symptoms don’t add up. She consults the other pediatrician in the practice, the one that called me out in the hospital for leaving Hayes unattended on the bed. She feels around.
“Hmmm… Ok, first thing. We think about is how this happened. No head trauma, but you might not remember that. Is it blood or something else. Did you call Children’s?” she asks our pediatrician. Children’s is Children’s Hospital, perhaps the best children’s hospital in the world.
Great.
It is decided that we need to go to Children’s to get a sonogram. We get into the room and the tech takes a look. She is really quite and barely laughs at the joke I make about the sonogram gel in Hayes’ hair. It takes about 20 minutes. The joke wasn’t that funny. She tells us she needs to speak with the radiologist and leaves.
10 Minures later… ok more like 2 minutes but it felt longer, she reappears with the radiologist. He does the same thing. Mutters something about “it crossing the midpoint”or something, then remarks to the tech something far more criptic, announces he is done and asks us what we are doing next. We explain that our doc will call us when she receives word about the results.
“Oh, so you don’t have an appointment next? Hmmm… well let me call her then I can tell you what she said.”
Uhm, ok.
“You can stay in here if you want… it’s more private for when he comes back,” the tech says to us after the radiologist has left, then promptly leaves herself.
Fuck.
We spend what feels like 30 minutes waiting. He returns with the tech.
“Ok, talked to her and shared the results. She’s going to call you,” He says. Jen and I look at each other then I look back at him, hoping to telekinetically move to explain his findings. He does. They found some stuff. “Nothing to lose sleep over,” he tells us.
Our pediatrician calls us 40 minutes later. The radiologist told her there is definitely fluid up there. Duh. Also, good news, no blood on the brain. Though nothing else can be gleaned from the sonogram. They still don’t know what the fluid is, what caused it, who killed JR… any of that. The sonogram further showed that the top part of his brain may be a bit thin. This caused our pediatrician to call the neurologist. They recommended an MRI.
So, we’re getting an MRI. They are hard to schedule at Children’s so we need to wait for them to call us tomorrow to see where we fit in. In the meantime, our pediatrician has told us that her gut instinct is that this is an anomoly, and that it will turn out fine. I think that’s true, too. Jen, well… she’s hopeful.
Now we wait for the MRI.