Mac's Crazy Melon

So Mac had an interesting weekend. We had our appt with the pediatrician on Thursday. Of course, the drama began right after that. I fed him right when we got home, and from that feeding on through the next 24 hours, he threw everything up. I called the neurosurgeon's office (a bulging fontanelle and vomiting are two signs that something's not right in brain-land) and was told that if he couldn't keep anything down by that afternoon we needed to take him to the Sacred Heart ER and get IV fluids and have him evaluated by the on-call neurosurgeon. Sweet! Just what we wanted to hear. By the cut-off time that we had been given, he had sloooowly started to get better--he'd keep down about every other feed by then. So we decided just to take it slow and see how he did through the weekend. On Saturday mid-morning, we watched his fontanelle go from completely bulging to completely sunken over the span of an hour. It was strange to say the least. The vomiting continued to taper off, and he "woke up" as it slowed down :) He was all of a sudden acting like a normal baby....able to stay awake through a full feed and then some, and not sleeping at night :) I don't think we realized how lethargic he was until he suddenly wasn't anymore. So that's where we were Monday morning when we had our appt with the neurosurgeon--completely confused and exhausted from trying to figure out what to do over the weekend. He also had some seizure-y type stuff while all of this was going, but since he wasn't keeping his seizure meds down, and something was obviously going awry, we weren't really surprised. Our neurosurgeon's thought, which we had already kind of surmised, was that he had a blockage in the shunt but that it made it through the catheter on its own. His sunken fontanelle can cause other troubles, and along with everything else that had gone on, he decided to have us head for another CT scan. That showed that one of the cysts inside the ventricle had gotten smaller, but the ventricles themselves had gotten bigger (sort of the fluid just shifting from one place to another). So, it all made sense to explain what had happened to our little bugger. We will have another CT in a week to make sure that the ventricles don't continue to increase. We were reminded, yet again, that this is going to be a long haul for Mac until we get him figured out. More than likely he will need shunts on either side of his head, but he's just not big enough for that yet, so we are keeping him as stable as we can until he is....or maybe he'll just never need another one! As of today, he's acting like a normal baby with a shunt sticking out the side of his head, and an incredibly sunken fontanelle. If he was wearing a hat, you wouldn't know anything was wrong :) He gets to get weighed tomorrow....not expecting great things after his little weekend binge :)

The rest of the crew is great! The weather is warm, Jeff is working once a week, and mostly all is well with the world!