Chasin' the clouds away...

Happy four month birthday, Timmy! He loves to sit up so much that his Mommy and Daddy got him a Bumbo—he loves it! He just could not get enough of looking around. He was pretty proud of himself for being such a big boy. I am so happy that he was not recovering from a major surgery on his birthday! His Daddy said that he had to make 5 trips to 4 different stores just to get the right color Bumbo…WOW! that’s dedication! (Timmy could not have a pink Bumbo. Eww!)

Yesterday he had two MRIs. I was not happy at first because they said my antlers were too big to fit in the MRI machine and they would not let me go along. The first MRI was of his spine. He has something called a low lying conus, and they wanted to make sure his spinal cord was not tethered. And it is not! So that is a big piece of good news!

The second MRI was of his brain, and the news from that is mixed, though mostly good. About 50% of kids with Opitz G/BBB are missing the tissue that connects the right and left halves of the brain (the corpus callosum). This results in developmental delays/intellectual disability, etc. But Timmy’s corpus callosum is there and is normal for a baby his age! They did find some punctates (little hemorrhages) in his brain—this is fairly common in babies that have been so sick and have undergone so much stress. They are not likely to have any big affect on him. The other thing they found in the MRI was evidence of an “insult” (damage to his brain, most likely due to a slightly prolonged period of oxygen deprivation) in the motor skills area of his brain. Our best guess is that this may have happened when he was in distress right before he was born (the reason for the emergency C-section). As we understand it, this may or may not affect him in any way. The brain is a pretty phenomenal thing, and is quite capable of compensating for stuff like this, it is just something for us to be aware of. (And, of course, it is one of those things that we never would have known about if there had not been another reason to do an MRI.) So all in all, the news from the brain MRI was fantastic! PURPLE POWER!!!

The other piece of wonderful news is that Timmy does not need an intestinal surgery after all! The surgeons say that his J-tube can be pulled out bedside and the hole should heal up on its own. This means that it is possible that we may all get to go home in three weeks or so!

Timmy’s Mommy and Daddy and I have been thinking back over the first few months, and the number of times we said to each other that we just wanted Timmy to have two good days in a row. It seemed like every time he had one good day, it was immediately followed by a major setback. Recently he has been having so many good days it makes my heinie squeaker squeak!

Today we got a visit from a speech pathologist who was wanting to see how Timmy would do with more milk. We got a video tape of him sucking away 5 ml’s through a bottle nipple and she said that he did really, really well. Everybody clap your hooves together and say, "Yay Timmy!" He latched on to the nipple and sucked harder than he ever sucked just a pacifier. She said that the only thing for his Mommy and Daddy to worry about will be to pace him so that he does not fill his Timmy tummy too quickly all at once. He was quite the show-off! We are expecting him to have no problems at all with the swallow study on Monday. The doctors want to x-ray Timmy when he drinks some dye so that they can see inside his little body where the dye goes to make sure it is going to all the right places. I have been practicing my cheers and I will bring my pom-poms to make sure we all celebrate after the swallow study.

Thanks for reading ya’ll!