Update on Ella's scope

Before procedure...hasn't eaten in 6 hrs but just as happy as can be...I don't get it!

In recovery, what a sweet baby!

Thank you all for your prayers for Ella today. Her scope procedure went very well and the actual procedure itself was very quick. It was the waiting before and after that took so long so it has been a long day for us but we are just thankful to hopefully be on the right track with getting Ella some help. So far from what they could see her esophagus, small intestines and stomach look good and healthy. The doctor did say though that her esophagus looked leathery and irritated probably from all of the spitting up that she does and her stomach is quite small. She said it looked healthy but was just very small. That was pretty much all the information we got as far as visual results from the scope. They took biopsies from her stomach, esophagus and small intestines as well and I think those results will be much more informative and help identify problems as far as damage, certain allergies, etc. are concerned. We will not get those results for another week. Overall, we are very thankful that things went smoothly today and that so far there is nothing hugely significant that was wrong. However, we are hoping that the biopsies and pH probe will give us more information as to what could be causing Ella's feeding problems.

Ella came home today with the pH probe and she will have it until tomorrow morning. This test is to check and measure for acid reflux. She has a tube down her nose that goes to her stomach and we have to chart every time we feed her, what we feed her and how long, when she coughs, cries, is restless, is irritable, when she spits up, when she sleeps, how she sleeps, when she wakes up and on and on. We will do this until tomorrow morning so it will be a long night. :) We also have to alternate feeding her juice and milk every other feeding so we have to change out all of that in her feeding tube every three hours so that is kind of brutal. Okay, not kind of brutal, very brutal but hey if all of this will tell us anything about how to help her we will do it! Poor thing has to wear arm immobilizers too throughout all of this so she can't bend her arms to pull out the tube. We will pull her tube out in the morning and return all of our charting to the hospital and we will get those results in a week when we get the biopsies. Sweet Ella, she is such a trooper!

That is about all I've got so far. We will definitely update once we get more results in. Please continue to pray that we will get some clear answers from these tests. Oh, by the way, in my last post I said that this Wednesday Ella had an Upper GI prcedure scheduled and a follow up appt. on Friday but both of those have been canceled and rescheduled as of today. The Upper GI procedure cannot be done within five days of a scope so she will have that next Wednesday, Feb. 11th instead. So next week she will have several appointments so we'll update on that when we know more. Thank you for all of your prayers and support, we definitely feel it and we are so thankful for all of you. Good night, I'm off to do some charting!