pH Probe

Since Claire was an infant she has been treated for Reflux. Typically this is something that a child will outgrow by the time they are one year of age. For Claire however every trial off her medication has shown that she has yet to outgrow the reflux so we recently visited a GI specialist at the Children's Hospital Colorado for further evaluation. Dr. Kramer agreed that this should have resolved by this age and recommended additional studies to determine if this really was reflux or something else that would benefit from other management.

The first of these studies was a 24 hour pH probe which was performed during an inpatient stay at the Children's Hospital Colorado. The goal of the study was to see if she was refluxing and they did that by placing a probe through her nose into her esophagus. Claire was a champ - doing all that was asked of her by the nurses right up until they placed the probe. Her immediate reaction was to pull it out and she almost succeed before they were able to stop her. She then had to wear no-no's which make it so that she was not able to bend her elbows therefore could not reach the tube. Off to x-ray we went to make sure that the probe was in place, by the time we returned to the procedure center to await the reading of the x-ray Claire figured out how to swipe the tube with her arms straight and almost got the tube out before they were able to secure it in place with some high strength tape. After confirming the position Claire was able to have some milk and sadly cry herself to sleep. The good news for her (and us) was once she woke up she was in a good mood and left the tube alone. We were then able to take off the no-nos and explore the hospital and visit with some of Mommy's co-workers. Claire proceeded to actually enjoy her hospital stay, marching around like she owned the placed, playing with her new toys that she received from Mommy, Daddy and Grandma Gibbons and playing in the playroom that a wonderful volunteer opened up in the evening.

Sleeping in the hospital bed with the little black bag that recorded all the data and hanging out watching Toy Story on the tv.

We are still awaiting the results from the probe study and hope to hear something this week. The next test in line is the Upper GI study. Hopefully we'll get this little problem figured out soon without having to move onto the more invasive tests like the endoscopy.

Updated 4/22/12- unfortunately the probe did not record any usable data, so we are heading back in on 4/25/12 to have an endoscopy and the probe placed again. Hopefully we will have a better outcome this time around.

Potty Training

While Melissa was away at the MDA Conference in Las Vegas, Claire decided that she was going to start using the potty full time. With Dave's help Claire became very confident in her ability to wear underoos and go potty on her duck potty. Unfortunately this new desire to use the potty did not extend to school and therefore we were in limbo with the potty. It seemed that the problem at school was with the potty so we set out the following weekend to expose Claire to other potties so that she could become more comfortable with non-duck potties. We bucked the traditional wisdom of staying home and headed out on the town. Claire did awesome using the potty at tumbling, at the historical museum, and the SMA Gala that we attended. She was very proud of her new skill and would announce that she "went pee" loudly and proudly to anyone who would listen. We ran into some problems the next day when the car ride to the zoo was just a little to long, but overall it was a pretty successful weekend with only two accidents. This method proved successful as Claire began to be more comfortable with the potties at school and we are moving closer to having a full potty trained little girl. Now the challenge is being able to quickly locate the nearest bathroom at every request to use the potty, which is more frequently than we ever anticipated.
Update- As of the end of March Claire was completely potty trained- quite excited for our big girl!