Pediatric Nephrologist and other appointments-

This week I took Ella for follow up blood work on Monday to do a lipid panel as her last one showed that her LDL cholesterol was 1 point above normal.  This freaks me out since both my kids are very healthy eaters.  They love their vegetables and frankly Jon and I are food snobs and rarely do they get to eat crap, at least compared to the rest of American children.  Ella is a 4 foot 1 inch, 51 lb, active, healthy, 7 year old with hypertension and high cholesterol......... Odd picture?  We have not heard the results yet but are hoping the first was a fluke.

On Tuesday we visited CHKD (the local children's hospital) for an EKG.  We had two wait 2 hours for our orders to be sent from Naval for a 10 second test and then had to schedule an Echo and a consult with the cardiologist there on 2 different dates  because they mis-read the orders....... That said, it was a pleasant 2 hours spent, as it was only my time and not money and the kids were SO well behaved.  Our care is free, and that is priceless right now.  I'm happy to spend two hours and reflect on how lucky we are to have awesome health insurance and to be receiving great care.   It seems the EKG looked normal.  Whew.

Today was the big appointment with the Pediatric Nephrologist, Dr. Restieno.  Dr. Restieno contracts with the Navy and sees patients at NMCP on Fridays and the rest of the time works at CHKD.  She was great, to the point, and I feel she was very thorough.  She explained Ella is in the 90-95th percentile for her BP.  We need to do more investigation on it and she spoke of possibly doing a 24 hour monitoring of it.  The hormone that one's body releases to control blood pressure was 0.76 which is low and good.  If her body was trying hard to keep the blood pressure low the number would have been around 5 or higher.  At least that's how I understood it.  Either way she is in the upper side of normal or possibly officially high..... This corresponds with the consensus over the last year.

Next she talked about Ella's Kidney size.  Her left is a little smaller than the right.  The Right is the one with the "something" on it.  Typically if the one with something on it isn't working correctly then the other will grow to compensate.  But this s not the case.  She thinks it could be human error in the imaging due to the fact that the left kidney is simply harder to image and it could be the same size.   More imaging s needed.

The kicker today was that the "something" the radiologist called "scarring" she strongly doesn't think it's scaring.  She is trying to decide on the best test to figure out exactly what it is......
We are still left with " What's on her right kidney? Is that causing her hypertension?  She did not seem to think it was a tumor or that it was affecting her kidney function.  She ruled out our fear of "could it be from lead toxicity after living in an old home with lead paint?"   I don't know what the other possibilities could be other than a vascular mass or hemangioma.  With her history the doctor agreed this is very possible. The image was blurry on the U/S.  blah blah blah.......

We left the appointment feeling like we are getting great care.  We also left feeling clueless and that it's possible there could be a whole lot of nothing going on, OR a whole lot of something.

Next week Ella has the Echo on the 18th, Renal study the 22nd, ped. Cardiologist appt, the 31st. Hopefully somewhere in there she gets an MRI or whatever is needed to best image and identify what's up on her Rt. Kidney. .

I can't express how grateful we are for our military health benefits.  Nor how grateful we are for your love and prayers.  Till next time!

Love,
Em