Adventures of our Jenna-girl

At Jenna's 9 month appointment, she was doing awesome. They gave her a flu shot and sent us home. She did not feel good for several days afterwards. I noticed she wasn't wanting to stand much and would fall over when I set her down. I thought it was mostly because she didn't feel good from the flu shot. After a week I was ready to take her back to the doctor, but then we thought she was starting to feel better. Over the next week, though, she would stand less and less, had a hard time crawling, became extremely fussy and couldn't sit up without leaning on something. I took her to the doctor (this was 2 weeks after her 9 mo. appt). The doc we saw did not know what was wrong with her. She ordered some blood tests and then the next day we got a call from her, saying they wanted to admit her to the children's hospital in Portland. Her white blood count was really high (19,000, normal is 5-10,000). She also had some other tests done that indicate inflammation and they were really high, too.

When examined at the hospital, the doctors determined it was her hip that was bothering her. She refused to put any weight on her left leg at all. With her blood work indicating such high inflammation and infection markers, they thought she must have an infection in her hip. They started her on antibiotics. They wanted to do an MRI to make sure, but weren't able to do that until the following day. They had to put her to sleep during the procedure, which made me kind of nervous. The MRI didn't show any infection in her hips, so they took her off the antibiotics. (Good thing, because she pulled her IV out later that day. Blood everywhere!)

The doctors (there were seriously 3-4 doctors if you included med. students, residents and overseeing doc) decided she must have Transient Synovitis which is inflammation of the fluid surrounding a joint. They are unsure of the cause. They think it may be caused by a virus, so the cold she'd had the week before could be the cause, but they don't know for sure. They gave Jenna Ibuprofen for the inflammation, and since we are able to do that at home, we got to take our baby home on Thanksgiving. We had Thanksgiving lunch/dinner at the hospital while Jenna had a nap (we waited ALL day to be checked out of the hospital and Jenna fell asleep about 10 minutes before they brought us the paperwork to sign, saying we could leave.) We finally made it home and Bret made us some delicious apple pie while we watched a movie together.

Well, Jenna didn't seem to really improve that much over the next 4-5 days. The Ibuprofen helped a lot with the pain in her hip, but she was still really fussy and just not feeling good. She wasn't any worse than before, but not really much better either. Tuesday we had a follow-up appointment with her primary care doctor. He had more labs done and was worried that she wasn't improving much and some of her labs were still kind of high (her WBC was normal, though). He wanted to make sure there wasn't something wrong that we were missing, so he wanted to have a bone scan done. The fastest way to get it done, was to admit Jenna to the hospital again, but just for the day. They injected her with some radioactive stuff that would show up in the bone scan. We had to hold her completely still for 3 minutes, while it scanned her. Twice. The radioactive stuff showed where her blood was going and would show if there was any area that was getting more blood than usual. The guy who did the scan made me change her diaper with gloves on, because her diapers could be radioactive. Weird!!

We went home and had a follow-up with Jenna's PCP (primary care physician) the next day. The bone scan was normal, which the doc was super excited about. He said he had stayed up at night worrying about what else could show up on the scan. By this time, Jenna was finally starting to act like she felt better. She would play and laugh and crawl around like normal and wasn't too fussy. She still wasn't and isn't putting much weight on her leg, but is at least putting some weight on it. She still likes to have support while sitting, but can do it a little on her own, now. Her hip still seems to bother her some, but I think it is getting to be less and less.

It has been a very worrisome and stressful 3 weeks. Hopefully over the next week or two Jenna will be back to her normal, adventuresome self!

Jenna sleeping in her hospital crib. That cast-like thing is covering her IV. She ended up pulling it off the 2nd day and kinking the IV, so they had to take it out. The nurse didn't put any pressure on it, just a band-aid, so Jenna started dripping blood all over!!
I LOVE Jenna's cheesy crooked smile!

Jenna was fascinated by the crib bars. They had lots of fun colors on them.

Bret and the boys came to pick us up on Thanksgiving. You should have seen the huge grin on Jenna's face when she saw her brothers walk into her room. She was soooo excited to see them!

Happy baby ready to go home.

And here she is just a couple days ago, at home, shortly after putting up the tree. Did I mention how much I love that crooked grin?