A day trip to the Inn

This afternoon was Ellie's long-anticipated GI study at Children's to assess the progress that her bowel has made and how functional the connection between her small bowel and colon is when the plug is in place. This will give us an idea of how far along she is and an idea of when we might think about scheduling her next surgery to reconnect her bowel and get rid of the ostomy.

Ellie was her charming self for the staff in radiology and she had lot of X-ray pictures taken of her bowels. I asked the radiology tech for the running total of 'belly films' that Ellie has had so far and she couldn't tell me. I am guessing that it has to be pushing 100 so far. Oh her poor guts.

The good part of today's study was getting time to wander around with Ellie between the time lapse pictures. all told it took 4 1/2 hours to take the full set of pictures and watch the barium go down her gut. What are you looking at? This is a KUB x-ray taken 2 hours and 20 minutes after the barium was injected into her stomach via her G-tube. The sections of bowel that have feathery edges are small bowel and bowel that has more lumpy edges is large bowel. The three round dots that are in the middle are the snaps from the back of her onesie, oops! In this shot the brightest or whitest parts are the large bowel because that is where most of the barium has moved to during the two hours and you can't really see her stomach because it is empty. This is good.

It has been a long time since we spent that much time at Children's and Ellie is a much different kid than she was the last time we made the rounds. She was especially fond of the garden in the middle of the hospital. the same garden that we took her for walks when she was tiny are now a lot more fun:

Sign? What sign? Oh that one? Isn't this a Children's hospital?

What a silly sign.

I bet I can take that with me as a souvenir.

We won't hear the interpreted results of the study for a few days but the early signs are that she still has some dilation in her small bowel but things are moving through. We will wait to discuss it further with her surgeon when we see him in early November boefore coming up with a plan for next steps.

In the meantime we will appreciate our time away from the Longwood Bar and Grill (Children's). Today's trip made us both realize that when we go back we will have a much different little girl with us and our stay may not be as smooth as it was when Ellie was an infant.