Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Sick little guy

The last couple days have been long ones. Colby has been pretty sick since Sunday evening. He started throwing up around 8pm Sunday and hasn't stopped since. He just happened to have a doctor's appt yesterday so the doctor looked at him and thought it was just a stomach bug. All his symptoms mirror that of a stomach bug...vomiting, irritability, being more tired. But when a baby has hydrocephalus and a shunt in their head, you have to question if this means his shunt is malfunctioning. Signs of a shunt malfunction include vomiting, irritability, being more tired than usual. Hmm, sounds familiar. Other signs of a shunt malfunction include loss of fine motor skills, impaired use of parts of the body, enlarging head and "sunsetting" of the eyes meaning the eyes will look straight down and the person won't be bring their eyes up. Thus far, we haven't seen any signs of these. But Colby is totally not himself. To be safe, if he doesn't show some signs of improvement today we're going to bring him to the hospital. They can either do a CAT scan or put a needle into his shunt to test the pressure to see if it's working properly. We don't want to be paranoid, but we can't be complacent either.
Colby's sleeping on the couch, all wrapped in blankets next to me. Tracey stayed up with him most of Sunday night. Last night, she took the first half of the night, I took "second shift". He took about 5 ounces of Pedialyte for me around 4 this morning and thus far has thrown up twice since then, but not much is coming up. So at least he's able to keep some in his belly.
The doctor also said yesterday that Colby had lost weight. He was down to about 17 pounds. Although this could have been because he was sick, he had only been throwing up for less than 24 hours at that time. So they may end up sending us to a specialist to see if he's able to absorb all he is supposed to.
So that's the latest. As always, life is full of it's ups and downs. Colby's sleeping on the couch, all wrapped in blankets next to me. With a little luck, today will bring some better news for him.

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