Sunday, June 30, 2013

UTIs & Updates

It's been forever since I made a post solely focusing on Carter's health and progress. You can see all of the fun things we've been up to at our Piatt Party of 3 blog! Overall, Carter has been AWESOME! Here are some highlights:

1. He's getting chunky. The kid will actually eat pretty well now. We no longer stress about every bite that he refuses. He weighed 27lbs (with clothes and shoes) at the pediatrician this week!


2. We went through a bad bought with UTIs from about February to late April.... I felt like he had one that entire time period. I'm not kidding when I say we would finish a 10-14 day antibiotic, and less than 2-3 days later he would run fever again and we would have to start all over. The last one at the end of April was two bugs... and it almost landed us a stay at Children's for IV antibiotics. Thankfully his kidney function looked better than it had in months when they had us get labs drawn in Montgomery, so we were able to try an oral antibiotic to clear it up. Since then they've switched his prophylactic antibiotic back to bactrim. He was UTI free through May, and just had a fever-fit this week. Hopefully this is not the start of another flood of infections.

 
3. Iron infusions! They decided after this last drop in his iron levels that we would try spacing his infusions out over a longer period of time to see how he maintained. His last one was in May (I think) and we have the last of this series scheduled for the middle of July. We're hoping that after this infusion his levels will stay stable, and we won't have to consider Epogen injections. Your kidneys aide in the absorption of iron by secreting a hormone - Epogen is a synthetic version of that hormone and "tricks" the kidney into functioning normally for iron absorption. Even though Carter's kidney function has always been decent, he does only have one... so this could definitely be a side-effect.

 
4. Physical therapy has been a blast. He had progressed so much! Just over the past month or so he has started trying to stand on his own in the middle of the floor. He's also getting much better at balancing and walking with assistance. Our current "homework" is to have him walk as much as possible. The hope is that keeping him on his feet will continue to strengthen his legs and core and give him more confidence in his abilities to stand and walk on his own. All is well on the speech-front.... this boy LOVES to talk!!