The liver plot thickens

The good news about C. is scarce these days.

She has still been signing "I want to eat" impressively (by putting her finger in her mouth) and putting the spoon in her mouth until her bowl is empty. But on every other score, she's not doing well. She does her daily MEDEK assisted walking with me - but not nearly as proficiently as she once did.

But most alarming are the awful blood test results which were unchanged today. And along with those, yesterday's ultrasound findings, the outstanding of which were abnormality of texture of the liver and mild to moderate ascites which the pediatrician referred to in his summary as "liver disease".

I can't recall whether I blogged about this but I did notice that C.'s stomach was enlarged and hard about two months ago. Inexplicably, and unforgivably, I brushed it off as insignificant or perhaps weight gain from the dietary changes I'd made on the dietician's recommendation.

There was so much else to tend to that shlepping C. to the pediatrician to have him examine her stomach didn't seem essential. After all, we were sending him photos of her pressure sores which were topping our list of headaches back then. And he didn't urge us to bring her in.

Besides, when we brought her to the wound clinic, she was examined and her fluid retention was declared "to be expected" and "to be ignored". The doctor doing the declaring was an orthopedist and we'd been scheduled to have the vascular specialist examine her.  But when I expressed doubt, the clinic nurse explained  that he was "unavailable". She assured us that this orthopedist was equally competent since all the doctors in the clinic were "one team".

The icing on this catastrophe cake is that after reading the ultrasound summary which we took the initiative of forwarding to C.'s neurologist, she promptly wrote back: "This is beyond the scope of my expertise. You need to talk to your family physician ASAP".

And then came the cherry on the icing: when we asked her whether she had submitted the request to the relevant government licensing office to raise C.'s cannabis dosage which she'd promised to do, she wrote back: "I would stop the cannabis now. There is a problem with her liver and no one knows if this is the cause."

Of course, it's more likely to be related to the valproic acid (which by the way she prescribed). But she isn't buying that theory.

Now I'm afraid she'll request that our license be rescinded.