Medical

Yesterday we had our long awaited appointment with Dr. Bay in Pediatric Genetics at the Kentucky Clinic. I say long awaited because after Eli was discharged from the NICU he had a laundry list of doctors to see and genetics was one of them. If you've ever tried to get an appointment with a geneticist you'll know that there is always a long line. We weren't able to get him in until January 2009 (6 months after he was discharged from the NICU). Well, the week before the appointment last January, Aaron's brother Joe passed away and we both were in Washington during the appointment. My parents, who stayed in Kentucky with Eli, took him to see Dr. Bay. A follow-up appointment was scheduled for a year later which brings us to yesterday. Anyway, she basically just wanted to see him to make sure everything was on track developmentally. Unfortunately, she is a little concerned that neither Noah or Eli are talking yet, not even really trying besides some variation of "dada." They are both scheduled for a hearing test, which we can't get until April 23rd. She also wants them to start seeing a speech therapist. I'm not too sure of the details of that yet though. I'm not sure if we have to wait until the results of the hearing test or if we'll be starting that soon. She wants to see us back in 6 months. As soon as we got home from that appointment I noticed that Eli felt warm. Sure enough he was running a slight fever (only about 100). I didn't really think much of it. He woke up this morning still with a low-grade fever but by this afternoon it was close to 103 degrees. This is really scary for Eli because fevers can lead to dehydration which can really cause damage to his already damaged kidney. So we took him into the Twilight Clinic. I really had no idea what was going on because his only other symptom was a runny nose which he has had all week. The doctor went through the usual procedure: gather medical history, listen to lungs, look in mouth, look in ears. Turns out he has a ear full of puss so we were sent home with a script for amoxicillin and hopefully he'll be feeling better in a couple days. Since we knew Eli was feeling bad and hadn't been drinking much, we picked up a milkshake on the way home. Here are the boys learning how to "share" it.