Dr. Seibel

We now have a pediatrician on our team. Yay! Her name is Dr. Melissa Seibel and she totally rocks. She has a super sweet, quiet, almost shy personality, which is in stark contrast to me so it should work out great!

Our first visit with her consisted of me going through my notebook. I don't think I have referenced "the notebook" yet in any of my posts. It's basically chock full of EVERYTHING that has ever been done on Mykaya. Test results, assessment forms, doctor reports, etc. It makes appointments like these very easy; you should see the look on people's faces when I open the book and they see what's in there. Dr. Seibel's reaction was "oh wow, you have everything!" I've learned that nobody else is going to keep track of it all in one place. It was great that I have it because even though I had requested records from several places at the beginning of February in anticipation of this appointment, not much of it had arrived. Pretty disappointing.

The first thing we did was go over the MRI results from November. The day of the MRI, we were met in recovery by a neurologist, who told us that they had found nothing concerning. We were sent on our way with a copy of the images on a CD (which I requested). I later called and got the report of the MRI and was stunned to see that it said there was a problem with her pituitary gland. It said "possible pituitary hypoplasia" due to a smaller than normal pituitary gland. I did some research on that and there isn't much out there. Your pituitary is the master gland in your brain which communicates with the endocrine system. The main thing it regulates is the hormones in your body, including growth.

Over the last year or so we have noticed that Mykaya seems to be growing "out" rather than "up". When they measured her at Dr. Seibel's office she measured 48.5" tall and weighed 66.6 lbs. She is at the 38th percentile for height and 88th percentile for weight. That was concerning to me because she has always been right at the 50th percentile for both height and weight. I talked to Dr. Seibel about that and she said she will not be worried until she goes below the 25th percentile for height. I (reluctantly) agreed. But she does want me to take her in for some bloodwork to check her thyroid function because of her rapid unexplained weight gain. We will be doing that today after OT/ST.

We are going to try out a new tactic for preparing her for the blood draw, which is no preparation. She has no idea and she won't until we get in there. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not, but we are at a loss. Last time, she was fully prepared and still freaked out because of the anticipation. We're hoping it will happen so fast that she won't have time to really think about it too much. I didn't want it to be looming over her all day today. We will be taking her up to Dr. Seibel's office to get numbing cream put on, then heading down to the lab. The worst thing about this is that when we were preparing for the shot last month, she kept asking "are they gonna take my blood out?" and I kept reassuring her that they weren't. So what now? I'm thinking about having us both get poked at the same time so we can go through it together. I will let you guys know how things go, and the results should be back tomorrow.

The other thing we went over was the abnormal EEG. She would like to set us up with a neurologist to order another EEG and see if we get the same results again. We can then go from there as far as whether a diagnosis of a seizure disorder is appropriate, or if we can get some more information. I was very agreeable to this as we did not get a lot of information the first time. We are scheduled to meet with Dr. Siruwan (the neurologist) on April 22. The EEG will be sometime after that.

Cross your fingers for us for the blood draw today!

With love,
The Schulz's