A 2yr Visit to the Doctor Means More Bad News

Ethan is 2! I love what John wrote on his birthday. Today, being 2 meant a visit to the doctor for Ethan. He's leaps and bounds ahead in his verbal and cognitive skills. Perfectly normal in his physical ones. The strange (and possible worrisome) thing about our boy is his growth. He spent nearly a year of his life off the charts for height and weight. He's now down to 75th percentile for height and 25th for weight. Not abnormal for an active kid with parents who were scrawny kids. But...

He's actually lost weight in the last six months. He weighs less than a pound more than he did a 12 months. He is getting taller, so we're not worried about a growth hormone problem like I had. But because he is taking in enough calories to be gaining more weight than that, we get to start the high fat diet and lab tests. What a laundry list of tests! A thyroid screen, iron studies, cbc, cmp, lipids, hormone levels, allergy panels, genetic screens, etc. I run these at work all the time, but it makes me sad that Ethan needs to have them done. They tried to draw enough blood for all the tests while we were in the office, but Ethan was too strong for us to hold still that long. He blew out a vein in his arm, so they are starting to test for the most likely issues. If they all come back negative, then we go back for more blood. If anything is wrong, then we go back to talk about what we do next.

The diet is disgustingly high in fat. If any of the rest of us ate like this, our cholesterol levels would skyrocket. They want me to add cream to his whole milk, use olive oil on his vegetables and pasta, push more meat, have him dip veggies in cheese sauce or ranch dressing and fruit in whipped cream, etc. She was particularly strong that I shouldn't feed him too many fruits and veggies. She wants to make sure that he gets the fat and protein he needs for growth. I'm disgusted just thinking about all that fat. But I'm going to make a grocery store run this afternoon. Yuck. Hopefully we only have to do this for a month or so.

Ethan isn't in a very good mood because his arm and leg hurt. (He got his flu shot too.) He didn't like the doctor's office before, but I think today will make it a much feared place. I'm pretty confident that he is just fine. Both John and I come from families that have big babies who often become scrawny little kids. But because it's such a drastic drop in growth, we are going to make sure nothing else is wrong. We wouldn't want to ignore it and later find out that there was a big problem.

I'll keep everyone updated as we know more. We'll have the first round of labs back by the end of the week.