Hunter's Conference

Yesterday we had our care conference with Hunter's doctor. Unfortunately, other than the chaplain, she was the only one there. One of Hunter's nurses was sick and the other was busy taking care of him. It was very nice to have some time to sit down and talk face-to-face with his doctor though, we haven't been able to do that for a while.

There were four major things that she covered: lungs, heart, reflux, and kidney stones.

Let's start with lungs. His lungs are not very healthy. As we already know, he is requiring large amounts of oxygen for a baby his age. He is still on 3 liters of oxygen, but is down to about 60%. Doctor said that her goal is to get him down to 1/2 liter at 100% before he comes home. If she can get him that low he can come home with oxygen. They are checking his lungs regularly to make sure he doesn't get an infection, but so far that hasn't been a problem.

There's not much to say about Hunter's heart, which makes me glad. The heart and lungs are closely related though, oxygen flows between the two so they can affect each other. In Hunter's case, his lungs are having a heck of a hard time, and it is causing some strain on his heart. The lower two ventricles of his heart are dilated. It's not anything they are too concerned about, they're just going to continue to watch it. Somehow this is causing the veins in his lungs to have higher blood pressure than normal. To treat the pulmonary hypertension he is getting an odd treatment - Viagra. Apparently Viagra's original use was to treat pulmonary hypertension and it's side effect became what it is best known for.

Reflux. It sounds like reflux is causing a lot of his problems, he has a pretty severe case. All babies spit up, but Hunter has a problem where he spits up and then inhales the formula and stomach acid into his lungs. They think that this could be causing a majority of his lung problems, too. To treat this they have moved his feeding tube past his stomach directly into his small intestine and he's receiving medication to reduce reflux and lower the potency of his stomach acid.

If this works and his lungs get better then they will know that is what is keeping his lungs from healing. If that's the case they will likely perform a small surgery to insert what they call a G Tube. A G tube is a tube that goes through the belly skin and is attached directly to the small intestine. There are pictures of the procedure all over the Internet, if anybody has a strong enough stomach to look it up.

He would have this procedure if the reflux is the only thing keeping him in the hospital. He would finally be able to come home, but there are many concerns about the procedure too. It would require general anesthesia and Hunter would have to be put back on a ventilator. It sounds like babies that are put on a ventilator for surgery have some trouble coming back off. Being fed through a tube can lead to "oral aversion" where the baby is no longer interested in being fed from a bottle.

There's not much that they can do about Hunter's kidney stones right now. They have ideas of what is causing it, but they can't do the test to be sure. There was a miscommunication between the lab in Chicago and Hunter's hospital. The lab requires 24 hours of urine (no less) to do the test, but a preservative needs to be added. The nurses didn't get the message about the preservative so the urine had to be thrown out. When they tried inserting another catheter his urethra was damaged. A urologist checked him out and said that everything would be fine but not to catheter him for a few weeks. Right now the kidney stones aren't doing any harm, so until he heals up and is ready to test again they are just going to keep an eye on him and make sure he's not in danger. They do have a specialist ready in case Hunter does require immediate treatment for his stones.

Lastly, he had an IV in his hand but it closed up. They tried to do it in his foot but that wouldn't work. Now he has an IV going into his head. Yeah, his head. Nurse says it's one of the best places for an IV even though it doesn't look so good. There are several nice big veins on the scalp and Hunter can't reach up there to pull it out.

Nurse says she thinks Hunter has blue eyes. With the sunlight shining on him in the picture it sure does look that way.