The GI Consult

You guys, I love the bah-jeezus out of this girl, but she throws up way too much. In fact, if you could see me right now I’m knocking on the wooden table I’m writing at because it’s been four months since the last GI sickness and I sure don’t want to jinx myself.

Back several months ago, I wrote on my Facebook page talking about how often Olivia picks up stomach bugs. Many of the comments asked if I had ever brought this up to her doctor and it got me thinking. I send off a message and her doctor wrote back saying she agreed, it was a lot of illnesses (six in ten months). She ordered some blood work for a panel (nothing out of the ordinary was found) and told me I could do a referral to a GI specialist to look into it further.

Before I hold you anymore in suspense, it all turned out to be pretty OK in the end, which I’m so thankful for.

I took her to the pediatric GI on Monday, seeing a nurse practitioner because I knew Olivia would be less screamy if she had a female provider versus a male and don’t you know Gastroenterology is a pretty penis driven specialty. I chose right though because the NP was wonderful. Olivia was still screamy and thought the idea of the nice lady trying to examine her tummy was akin to be flayed alive.

But after the horrors of:

being weighed (she screamed her head off and kept trying to fling herself off the table to get to me)

being measured (ten minutes of trying to convince her to stand the fuck still against the wall like she loves to do with her Daddy at home against her own wall and then another three of being held down on the exam table trying to kick the pencil out of the nurses hand, probably resulting in her being three inches shorter in her medical chart)

being looked at wrong by the nurse practicioner GASP!!!!!!!!

—she was so not in the right frame of mind to do additional blood work, so we had to get that done at our own clinic.

The NP took her history and said celiac disease was a possibility because apparently, it can have cyclical cycles (I don’t think I said that right), where she could appear to be sick and it just cycles periodically. However, even if there was the slight chance she did, they couldn’t do much about it for a few years until Olivia’s immune system matures.

She ordered an extensive celiac blood work panel, but she didn’t think it would be positive.

She did agree that most likely Olivia is just more susceptible to viruses (lucky us) and that we didn’t need to pursue anything further than the lab work.

We got the results back a few days after we did them, and they weren’t remarkable.

It’s easy to think we’re back to square one, but I’m still glad we did the consult, just for peace of mind. Knock on wood (again), Olivia hasn’t caught another GI bug since the beginning of October and I hate even writing that because I’m totally jinxing myself.