Poor Jocelyn has had a stomach ache for months now.  Months!  Poor kid is hurting ALL THE TIME.  We have been to her pediatrician, we have eliminated dairy from her diet, we put her on antacids, and we put her on Miralax.  And nothing has worked.  She gets bloated, and her pain is at her belly button, which can mean absolutely anyting.

So we finally went to a GI doctor on Wednesday of this week.  He’s a pediatric GI doctor, so he has a lot of experience with children.  He suggested doing extensive testing, but warned that he may not find anything.  Evidently, about 30% of children complain of tummy distress, and it eventually just goes away.  Still, though, we want to rule out anything that could be troubling.  It could be an allergy or sensitivity that we just don’t know about yet.

So we spent the morning getting tested.  Poor Jocelyn had to undergo an upper endoscopy and a full abdominal ultrasound.  For both procedures, she had to have an empty stomach, so we scheduled them both on the same day so she would only have to skip breakfast once.

Jocelyn was a trouper!  I mean, she is seriously one tough cookie!  We scheduled the scope first, because that one had no food or drink allowed.  We had to get there by 6:30, so when I woke her up at 5:40, she popped right out of bed and got dressed like it was no big thing.  She was fine to not eat or drink anything for a very long time.  When the nurse called us back to the prep room, she quickly followed, not needing any hand-holding.  She was super brave when they hooked her up to different machines, and got wheeled off to the operating room with no problems.  I was so impressed.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed in the operating room, but that was for the best as I was a nervous wreck.

When it was all over, she was groggy and confused – poor thing!  And she was in a lot of pain.  She was super thirsty, so she drank a bunch of water, and she really hated having the IV in.  Once that was removed, she was much happier.  Also, once she had a few ice pops (3, so she could try all of the colors), she was happier still.  And the room had a TV, so we watched Disney Channel while we waited around for her to get discharged. 

The good news is that the doctor didn’t see anything that stood out in the endoscopy pictures.  We’ll see if anything comes back from the biopsies, but right now we can almost completely rule out any major GI diseases.  The bad news, of course, is that we still don’t know why she has tummy troubles. 

After she was all recovered, we took her to get a bunch of abdominal ultrasounds.  That was very interesting, but we don’t know what (if anything) they saw, since the tech didn’t tell us anything.  That didn’t hurt, of course, but she hated it just the same because she was bored, hungry, and hurting.  It also took a long time – far longer than any ultrasound that I ever had done (which makes sense, mine were only of one specific part, although there were always a lot of measurements. 

When it was finally all done, we went on a hunt to find a restaurant that would serve pancakes.  I had to call a few places in the area – most of them had French toast, but not pancakes (weird!). But then we found one that was super close to where we were.  Of course, when we did get there, Jocelyn changed her mind and wanted French toast!  HAHA!  She ate a TON of food.  Poor hungry kid!  And then just rested for the rest of the day.

But, by evening time, she and Donovan were running around the basement, kicking the soccer ball.  So I would say that her recover was just fine J.