Upper Endoscopy

Natalie had her upper endoscopy this morning. The doctors and nurses were so great and let Lee and me stay with her right up until they gave her the IV. Lee even got to hold her while the anesthesiologist gave her the gas to make her fall asleep. That part was a little hard (emotionally, not physically), but I'm glad we did it. I didn't want her to be surrounded by strangers when she fell asleep.

The procedure only took about 20 minutes and then we got to see Natalie in the recovery room. I immediately fed her (she had been food-less for almost 5 hours) and she fell right to sleep afterwards. We stayed in the recovery room for an hour just to make sure she didn't have a bad reaction to the anesthesia. While we were waiting, her doctor came in the room to talk to us about the results.

Final result: he couldn't see any signs of redness, irritation, or inflammation in her esophagus or stomach. He did take a biopsy of her stomach just as a precaution, but he said he didn't expect the results to come back with anything.

So in other words, she shows no sign of reflux.

Hm.

This is good news. I know it is. I don't want Natalie to have reflux. But if she did have it, we could have gotten her medicine for it. And maybe she would start feeling a little more comfortable.

I have to keep reminding myself that even though the endoscopy revealed no reflux, it doesn't mean we put Natalie through all of this unnecessarily. We were able to successfully cross off the list a possible cause of her discomfort.

So we're not quite sure of our next steps. We'll wait for the results of the biopsy and then talk to Nat's pediatrician. My guess is that we'll start Natalie on rice cereal to see if that helps. I was planning on waiting until she was six months old to start rice cereal, but maybe it's not a bad idea to start it a little earlier.