We just arrived home safely from a long (18-hour) day trip to San Francisco. Silas had his six-month follow-up MRI at UCSF this afternoon, and he was a trooper. This MRI will be his new baseline which we'll compare all of his future ultrasounds and MRIs to. It was a scheduled appointment and not an emergency.
We left in the early morning and made it to the hospital an hour early with enough time to get a bite to eat before Silas's appointment. (The drive can be anywhere between four and five hours depending on traffic how often we have to stop for baby. This morning we did it in close to four hours.) Poor Silas had to fast after midnight last night, so he got a little grouchy on the drive up, but after a late-morning nap, he seemed to forget all about it and showed up to radiology with a smile on his face as usual. We felt guilty eating and drinking while he was fasting so we found little ways to take turns snacking by trading off filling up the gas tank, changing him, etc. But our job was pretty easy compared to his--altogether he went 15 hours without food today.
When we got checked in and met with the anesthesiologists they connected Silas's trach to a tube that fed him some gas that made him sleepy and then knocked him out. Then they put in an IV and sedated him with Propofol and put him into the MRI scanner to begin the study. The process took well over two hours. In the meantime, we got to go downstairs and meet up with Dr. Brown, one of Silas's doctors from his hospital stay in March/April, and her husband and got to see their brand new adorable baby boy who is only a week old.
When the study was complete, they called us in as they began to rouse him from his anesthetics. After about fifteen minutes, he slowly started to wake up. He was a little floppy for the first few minutes and his eyes a little uncoordinated at first, but within a few minutes he was himself again and was overjoyed to be able to eat again. He ate three more times before we got home, and he was perfect on the drive back, which went very quickly.
Tomorrow we'll expect a call or e-mail from the doctors with a report of what they found. We always leave the hospital with discs of his latest studies in case we ever need them at another hospital in a pinch. Since we came home right after his study, we just have the images but not the official reports from radiology and neurosurgery. Looking very briefly at a few of the images from today (there are more than 2,000 of them) it looks like his lateral ventricles are small but not completely collapsed, which is a good sign. It is difficult to see exactly what's going on with the area around cerebellum and brain stem where he had his decompression surgery without any specialized knowledge, so we'll leave that for the experts. For now, we're happy to be home safely after a long day, and thankful Silas was so strong and patient on the drive and in the hospital. Thanks, everyone, for your prayers and support. With his trach and breathing issues, it's hard not to be nervous any time he goes under anesthesia, but he did wonderfully and the study went without a hitch. Now to catch up with baby and get some sleep...
