ENT

I'll begin by catching things up some.  When the sleep study results came back positive for Mild Chronic Obstructive Sleep Apnea, our pediatrician was hesitant to jump on the tonsil/adenoid surgery train.  She explained that if the apnea was caused by allergies, the adenoids would just grow back and the surgery would be pointless.  So, we went and had blood work done to test for the allergist.  It all came back negative though so we were then referred to an ENT.

Sophie and I visited Dr. Deitch today and he was wonderful with her.  I would say he's been the best pediatric specialist we've met yet.  He was right on her level, and she actually enjoyed the examination.  He came to the same conclusion all others have, her tonsils aren't huge (not small necessarily but also not huge), though the left is slightly larger that the right.  His advice is that we go ahead with the surgery in anticipation of her adenoids being huge and the cause of the apnea.  He did clarify that if they are found to be normal, which he doubts, they would not proceed with the surgery but he doesn't think it's worth spending the resources on an x-ray first.

He took the time to clarify that if she didn't have a seizure disorder he would recommend simply waiting and re-checking later to see if she just can outgrow the apnea, but due to the seizure complication it's better to go ahead and do the surgery.  There were various reasons for this which he explained very clearly but of course of which I retained very little.  He also pointed out that his recommendation follows the sleep doctors recommendation completely.

The surgery is done on a Monday, and she'll be out of school for a week.  I guess it's good we're taking care of it while she only has three days of school weekly.  We're thinking the Monday before Thanksgiving will be best since Joe and Sophie already have Thursday and Friday off.  I think we've decided I'll take Monday through Wednesday off instead of Thanksgiving and the day after.  In the end, I'll only spend one extra day of PTO and she can stay home where she's comfortable all week.  The bad news is that we were planning on heading to Eau Claire for Thanksgiving, which we haven't done in far too long, but luckily much of our family will be visiting us here the weekend before for my Consecration and I think we'll still travel to Eau Claire the next weekend once she's feeling better.

So, for now, I'll be working on Thanksgiving while cooking a small turkey in the crockpot, if that is possible. It may just go down as our worst Thanksgiving ever but we'll count our blessings and all that we're thankful for nonetheless.

Now, on to Halloween!