Angelina Updates

Well the week of Thanksgiving Angelina had an outpatient procedure at Cook's to check out her GI tract, take biopsies of her GI tissues and also to place a PH Impedance probe in her esophagus so that they could tell if she was having reflux, get its PH balance, acid content, etc. We got those results back last week. After all this time Larry and I and her therapists are not completely insane....she does have reflux - hence all the non-provoked vomiting! Also it is starting to cause damage to her esophageal area on a microscopic basis. Her doctor doubled her reflux medicine and is giving that six weeks to work. I think that if Angelina is she is still vomiting when we go back to see the doc they will be recommending a surgery called fundoplacation (aka "fundo"). Basically, this procedure would wrap her stomach around the base of her esophagus so that the sphincter would remain closed when she got full and would decrease or eliminate vomiting for her. I really don't want her to have this done, but if she keeps vomiting they way she has been then she will have even more damage in her esophagus, which we don't want either. They she really wouldn't want to try to swallow anything!

Today she only threw-up one time - yeah! She had like an 8 hour stomach bug on Wednesday but got over that and was ready to go the next day. I am hopeful the medicine works, but it seems that when some doctor starts talking about surgery she inevitably has it.

Also, she went back to see her optometrist, Dr. Hunt. He has been seeing her since the beginning. He did both her eye surgeries and we really like him. He has recommended an eye surgery to "straighten" her right eye so that she won't lose sight in it. If you hadn't noticed, her eyes tend to wander out. If we just left it alone eventually she would lose sight in the weaker eye because the brain would just shut one of them off since it can't focus on two different things at once. He is letting us continue to try the drops to see if they help strengthen her right eye, but is not optimistic that there will be any change. We'll see.

We will take her on the 16th to be fitted for leg braces called "AFO's". I can't remember what that stands for right now! Anyway, hopefully she will have them before Christmas. She is doing so well in Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy. She goes once a week right now and the therapists are doing their session together to get the best result for her. She seems to be responding to it pretty well. I think it helps that Briddy (PT) is there with the Debbie (OT) since OT is so new and Angelina doesn't really know her yet. She really likes Briddy though. She also goes to Speech Therapy once a week as well but since her vomiting had increased she hasn't really been doing all that well lately. We have stopped giving her pureed and now we are using flat suckers and graham cracker crumbs! That is more fun anyway. She does really well with these two different textures and seems not to be afraid to swallow the crumbs. Jana (ST) thinks that once the reflux is under control she will be more willing to try to swallow food. It is what it is and I am not so much worried about the eating food thing as I am getting her motivated to want to crawl or push to sitting, things like that. Poor vision begets lack of motivation to try to get to things one really can't see anyway!

That is all for the medical side of updates right now!