Carter Update

Magazines to educate your kids.

Carter looked pretty cute in his scrubs.  He was a big fan of the wheel chair.  

I’m a little late on this one! We have been doing some investigation on Carter for a while now because his voice got very hoarse about a year ago. The doctor thought it could be reflux. So we had been on a reflux medicine, which helped but the doctor didn’t want him on it long term. So we went down the road with the ENT, Allergist and GI specialist. ENT continued the reflux medicine, Allergist came out great and the GI specialist chose to do a couple additional procedures. One was quite harmless, he had to drink this juice (and thankfully he drank it!!) and they took xrays of his stomach. All of these tests came back great. The next was to put a scope down and see if the reflux was damaging him internally, they also wanted to do a biopsy at this time.

Of course for this procedure, they would have to put him under. Keith and I were a little bit frustrated with this. You never really want to put your child under – it is very safe, but you are always putting them at risk! When we did their tubes and tear ducts, it was easy to justify because we knew it was to solve a problem, ultimately keeping them healthier and in the end they would feel much better. This was more on the exploratory side – so we struggled a little bit with putting him through the procedure.

He was really nervous about it, but did great. They tricked him into going right into the operating room with some bubbles and we were back with him within 25 minutes. He came out of it much better than the previous two surgeries, so that helped. Just out of it for a while. Of course since he is a COMPLETE daddy’s boy right now, he really just wanted Keith. This was hard for me because I really just wanted to hold him!

Fortunately, all tests looked great! The downside is we still don’t have a solution. We have decided to take him off the medicine for a period of time to see what happens. After just a little over a week we can tell his voice is already weakening a bit, so we will continue to monitor. I have also been trying to connect if certain foods cause him to clear his throat more often, but not seeing a lot of consistency. We have been trying to scale back on juice and I think that does help some.

I’ll keep you posted if we do more or learn more or if any of you have had similar experiences and have recommendations, we would love to hear them.