Medical Moments

In January I got a call from Ben's teacher saying he had fallen off the bus and that I should probably come and take him to the doctor.

When I arrived they were finishing cleaning him up and he had calmed down.  They said he had been crying pretty hard...apparently they had all been crying after it happened :)

They said that he had been unbuckled prematurely, had slipped past the aide and bus driver, tried to go down the stairs himself and fell face first on the concrete.

This picture is before he saw the doctor.

The doctor checked him out and said he looked okay and if I was worried about a broken nose after the swelling had gone down to bring him back in.

A few days later...

He scabbed up pretty quickly and looked really good within a week (however, the spots where the scrapes were the worst still get red at random times...it's kind of weird)

A concerned grandmother ;) felt like his nose looked crooked so I took him in and they doctor said he felt like it was still just soft tissue swelling.

Since then his teacher says she feels like it looks crooked too.

He seems to be breathing fine so even if it was broken it seems to be purely a cosmetic issue and I figure he has and will continue to wrack up a few of those over the years with accidents/injuries.

He's still pretty cute to me :)

A couple of weeks later we had an experience with Josh...

I have recorded this in depth elsewhere so I won't go into a whole lot of detail here but there were all kinds of miracles and blessings that occurred alongside Josh's traumatic experience...

In short, Josh was eating lunch and got some food stuck in his throat.

He has had this happen before but this time it wasn't going away.  He was able to breathe but couldn't swallow.  A fellow student (I'll forever bless his name because I don't know how long Josh would have continued on alone without him) told administration that someone was choking in the bathroom.  The school nurse, who covers 10 schools in the area and just happened to be there at that time called me and once they finally got a hold of me (another story) I rushed over.  She said he needed to be seen right away for fear of the esophagus tearing.  Since he wasn't 16 yrs old yet none of the local GI guys would see him so she was saying we would probably have to transport him to Ogden or even Salt Lake if they couldn't get a hold of the guy in Ogden...which they weren't able to.

She said whatever we ended up doing she felt like we should just take him to our ER in the meantime.

So I drove him in the crazy snow storm we were having at the time and Andy met us there.

The school nurse informed us right as we were getting ready to go that a local dr. had consented to see Josh and cleared his schedule so he could perform a scope on him.  I was so grateful for that!

They got Josh all registered and hooked up with an IV.  They also gave him some medication and told us what time he was scheduled to go in.  It was another hour or two so Andy and I tried to entertain him as he sat drooling into a bag.

 

Of course the ER dr was a former student of Andy's and an acquaintance of my youngest brother :)

It was 15 minutes past the scheduled time for Josh's scope but they had not taken him in yet, and all of a sudden, Josh proclaims,"It went down!"  I don't know if I have ever seen him more relieved than at that moment.  He was grinning from ear to ear.

They checked with the dr and then went ahead and released us telling us to go in soon for an esophagus dilation.

Happy Day!

Multiple relatives on both sides of the family have this issue and procedure done and so we reassured Josh that everything would be fine.

He went in on Valentine's Day for the procedure.  Dr Garg was very kind and again, I was so thankful that he was willing to take Josh even though he was still a pediatric patient.

Josh was not thrilled to be there but he is such a trooper and does what needs to be done.

All went well and Dr Garg diagnosed him with EOE.  Apparently, from what we've heard since, it's rare for someone so young to have this.

He said he wanted to see him again 4 weeks later to do some more stretching since he couldn't do it all at once.

After both times, Josh was out like a log.  The nurses commented on how out of it he was and how long it took him to come out of the induced sleep.

Bless his heart!

He is on medication and will see an allergist and follow up with dr garg again this month.

After these two experiences happening so closely together I would not have been surprised to get a call from the school telling me Matt had a medical emergency (glad that did not happen:)