Thursday, September 25, 2008

A New Diagnosis

Finally we are making some progress on Kendra's diagnosis for her abdominal issues. Thanks to our wonderful pediatrician who listens and really problem solves. Although we may still have to go to some new specialists, our pediatrician has been really proactive in her own detective work and has discovered some of the factors in Kendra's continuing ill health.

We now know she has a low thyroid, this was detected by the Dr. insisting that the insurance company pay for the more in depth thyroid blood work, the most common thyroid check had come back normal. So she is on thyroid meds. We have known forever that Kendra is mildly anemic but now the DR. wants to aggressively treat it, thinking that her fatigue, etc may be linked to the anemia that many of the specialist have just blown off because it wasn't super serious. Our Dr. commented that all the base lines are just averages and what looks just a little low to the base line, may for that one person be more serious.

Most importantly of all, the Dr. has diagnosed her stomach pain and we are really thinking this is the right one this time. Anyone ever heard of abdominal migraines? Well that is possibly what Kendra is having. It all fits, we have a strong maternal link to migraines all through the women in my family (myself, included) and the type of pain and the associated symptoms all fit. So hopefully we will try out some migraine meds and see if we can't get a handle on this.

It would be such a relief for all of us to get a diagnosis and a treatment plan so she can get back to living a more typical teen life. After all of the specialists have been pooh poohing her abdominal pain Kendra has started to think that there is something wrong with her brain as in she must be making it up or something. I hated to see her second guessing herself. And we were beginning to see a lot of depression as her life has gotten more and more constrained and many folks (teachers, etc.) were saying that she was faking it.

So I really hope this is the right diagnosis and that we can get a treatment plan in place and working. to have this burden lifted would be great.

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