So about the relux

I've been getting a lot of questions. And I realized not everyone was around when I was little and had this problem and therefor dont know what urinary reflux is sooo....

The "real" name is vesicoureteral reflux. In a normal person when the kindeys flush urine into the bladder a little flap over the connecting tube flaps shut to prevent any subsequent swirling from going back into the kidneys. Zeke's flap doesn't flap shut. Therefor when there is swirling (which there always is, Im told) some urine goes back into his kidneys. This happens again and again and again. So bacteria builds up. So he gets a urinary tract infection, or UTI.

Too many UTI's are bad. Because of a few reasons.
A. They are painful and generally suck.
B. They are hard to catch in babies, they cant tell you it hurts to pee and by the time you get a fever from one its pretty hard-core.
C. if you get too many you get major kidney scarring and become desensitized so you can no longer feel the pain and don't know when you have a UTI anymore. (this has happened to me)

So to stop Zeke from getting them constantly he will take amoxicillin (sp?) everyday. (By the way, he loves this stuff. its so sweet the smell makes me sick but he just opens wide for more.)
We will also see a specialist once a year for a special x-ray called, wait for it, a voiding cystourethrogram. What they do is put a tube up Zeke's penis into his bladder and then shoot a special liquid that will show on the x-ray thru the tube. They take pictures as the bladder fills and then as Zeke urinates. This shows the reflux and will let us know when Zeke has grown out of it. They also really really suck, they are the scans I've been talking about remembering so fondly.

So I hope that answers all questions.

Also here are some pics of Zeke at the hospital before we took out his IV. I think the get-up they had to put over it to keep him from chewing on it is hilarious, personally. It seems like every nurse shift took one look at him chewing away and added more. When we took it off there was a HUGE pile of tape, some cotton usually used for splints, half of a pill-cup, and some of that spider-man netting.

1 comment:

Jennspiration said...

Poor little buddy. Hope things get better.