My Boy

For Mak's entire life, he has pretty much had a runny nose, diarrhea, and a cough. We haven't thought much about it. We just thought he got sick easily. It really hasn't seemed to bother him either. But we finally decided to get to the "bottom" of it. So here's the scoop (or should I say "here's the Poop"). We took him to the doctor and she said to have some tests run to see if everything is related or completely separate. So after taking him off of lactose for a week and still blowout city, our next step was to take some poop samples (that I had to scoop into four different tubes) up to be tested. The same day we took up the poop we had to have some blood tests run on Makee to test to see if he had a bacteria, Celiac's disease, and some other stuff. It was the saddest thing ever. It took me, Dan and two nurses holding him down while they took all his blood. But he got a very cool blue bandage on his arm after and so did his "Powa." And we let him pick out his own treat at his Daddy's work when it was all over. All the tests came back negative. One thing that did show up in the tests was that he had a lot of fecal fat in his stools, which means food is going right through him for some reason. The Doc also said that could be a sign of cystic fibrosis, although she wasn't too worried about that. Nevertheless, she wanted us to have Mak tested for it just in case. So we took him up to Primary Children's Medical center for a sweat chloride test. They put these things on his forearms to shock them and apparently introduce sweat. Then he had to tape heating pads on his arms, and put on his coat, a hat, and let him run around the hospital for a half hour. The kid's head was wet with sweat. But no sweat on his forearms. Who sweats there anyway? What a weird test. We've had it done twice with no luck. We also had his chest x-ray to see if he has asthma. So after all these tests and finding that he's not really lactose intolerant or anything else so far, we took him to an allergist. Guess what? No allergies. At least not the ones they tested him for. However, the allergist did say she thinks he has asthma, which is what our pediatrician thought after seeing his x-rays. So we have an inhaler for him which we have not had to use since the weather has been so nice. Hopefully the asthma won't be a big deal. It seemed a lot worse in winter. After the good news (and not so good news about allergies, because we were convinced that was the problem and that we could easily fix it), Mak was off to a gastrointestinal doctor to see what was next for this boy. The GI doc really didn't think he had cystic fibrosis. He wanted to test his stools to see if there was blood in them. So that's where we're at right now. The poop smears are in the mail. After all these tests we pretty much know absolutely nothing more than before they were done. But hey, at least we are eliminating things. And hopefully things will get better as he gets older if nothing else. I have hated putting our sweet boy through all of these things, but I guess it's better to do what we can than to do nothing.