9 more days. Come ooooooon May 17th...!
Part of the deal with this whole colonoscopy/endoscopy/pill cam procedure--wait, did I mention the pill cam? I didn't. It travels all the way through them, taking a photo every 30 seconds that is transmitted to a little box they wear on a belt until it passes. This enables the doctor to see damage in the small intestine, the vast majority of which is inaccessible by even the longest scopes. Irritatingly, despite the advanced technology of a freaking wireless digital camera the size of a pill, it does NOT in fact have any sort of "channel" function on it. The camera broadcasts indiscriminately, and the boxes pick it all up. So any two children who are having the same procedure done must stay at least 50 feet apart from each other for a minimum of 8 hours, lest their boxes pick up the other one's photos. So Minifobette will come home to chill after her scope, while Minifob will have to spend the rest of the day out playing minigolf and arcade games with daddy. So sad for him, I know.
ANYWAY, part of the deal with this whole procedure is that we don't want to miss anything that may be held partially under control by their considerable number of digestive medications. So we were told they absolutely must be off all of them for three weeks. No probiotics, no antimicrobials (sure, why not give Minifobette's infection the chance to become sentient,) and no digestive enzymes (Minifob didn't want to absorb any nutrients from his food anyway.) The girl has at least held steady at her usual "not on antibiotics" nastiness, though we've had to double up her normal dose of laxatives to keep it moving... but the boy is falling apart. On Friday I got an email from his teacher noting his downward spiral and asking what had changed for him. We have an agreement that I don't tell her when we're making changes to his medication, so she can act as an objective observer on his behaviors and skills. She said that he is spending most of the lunch period trying to lay across the bench, a movement he does to put pressure on his abdomen when it hurts. He's also verbally stimming almost nonstop (chanting the time on the clock every second as it ticks forward, fixating on chains of syllables in falsetto like "digga digga digga," clicking and ticking and making every noise you can imagine with his mouth...) I admit, for me this is worse than meltdowns, I have a really hard time with the constant aural onslaught. But as I told his teacher, all I can do is keep scaling back his food to more digestible stuff (I'll be down to nothing but applesauce and elemental formula boxes soon, after which I can't go any further,) and just keep him home from school if he becomes unmanageable. On the other hand, it's kind of good for his future Kindergarten teacher to get to see him like this, so she understands what I mean when I say he can't eat certain things.
Meanwhile, Mr. Clod just left for Minnesota. Turns out I was still underestimating the size of the operation: they'll be taking a 4-inch long piece of muscle out of his leg tomorrow morning. There's a sample video of it
here for those of you who like watching medical procedures. It's fairly creepy.