Flexin'

The last 10 days have been chock full of activity. Where, oh where, to begin. Well for starters, Leo kicked the UTI. Hooray! And he had his big reflux test yesterday at Seattle Children's Hospital to see if his pee is shooting back up into the ureters into the bladder and therefore causing bacteria to grow...hence the UTIs. The procedure was quite something. They strapped him down on a table, literally strapped him down. He couldn't move, his arms were stretched up over his head and his legs were straightened out at the other end. They put a catheter up his wee wee and then shot dye up there so that they could see on the xray machine whether liquid was going out the exit, as it should, or creeping back up. I have to say, seeing Leo strapped down to a table, crying his head off, was as awful as it sounds. But he was a trooper and it certainly wasn't hurting him any, just a little disconcerting I would think. And about 10 minutes later - success! He does not have the reflux! All plumbing parts are working correctly. So this means the UTIs are a function of the turtleneck that he still has. After our trip to Children's we high tailed it over to Swedish to meet with his Urologist who was very pleased with how normal his parts are now...in the hospital they were very teeny tiny, but there was also, how shall I put this, extra material on the turtleneck. There was lots of swelling in the region too. But now things are looking normal and she thinks we can get rid of that turtleneck in another month or so. Yay! So he'll only need to be on a low dose of antibiotics for another few weeks and that's it. Relief.

And then today we had his big physical therapy assessment. We discovered, about a week ago, that his head is slightly misshapen...one side is flatter than the other which causes the ears on that side to sit farther back than the other side. You can't really tell until you look at the top of his head. It's kinda funny really. It's pretty minor stuff, easy to fix when you catch it this early, and it just means he'll be doing weekly PT for a while to correct it. The good news is that the therapist didn't see anything else that worried her about his development or milestones. He's going to be delayed on all the regular baby milestones, but we knew that already, and so we just need to remain patient. Having him in weekly therapy will also do wonders for catching anything else that may creep up. So we're feeling really positive about all of this.

It's easy to continue to be discouraged about all the never-ending treatment stuff Leo's dealing with. I cannot wait for the day when he's just a boring normal kid. But we are light years ahead of where we were in the hospital and I'm reminded of that constantly. The fact that all we're really dealing with at this point is a little physical therapy and an impending circumcision is a miracle to me. And it's weeks like this week where we saw just about every part of his medical team in the span of two days that I'm reminded of how fortunate we are to have him the hands of such capable, loving professionals. I'm really blown away when I sit and think about it. And, yet again, I'm grateful.