Thursday, March 31, 2011

Little man, big problems

On Wednesday, Zach went to his regualr GI doctor at Brenner's. He had a couple of issues going on, for one...he is having diarrhea again and for two...he has to be hooked up to his venting bag on his g-tube when he is doing 18 hrs of feeds through his j tube. He is draining a lot out of his g tube into his bag so that is worrisome. When we were in the waiting room, I noticed he was draining his formula into his bag which is not good.
We met with his doctor and he sent him for xrays...he was thinking some type of obstruction causing the excessive draining but all the xrays were clear. He discussed doing some more motility testing to see what is going on with his GI tract. Something is not functioning correctly and he is going to try to find out. He is thinking some type of reverse motility, meaning instead of going down and through his intestines like normal, stuff is going up and back into his stomach.
Our plan is to drop his feeds back down to 10 hrs a day for a few days to let his symptoms subside and then slowly day by day we go up an hour in feed time until we reach the point that the symptoms come back. He also said if we can't figure this out, or we can't fix it, we will have to go to a central line or TPN for nutrition to "fatten him up"
He is dropping from 1200 calories a day, what he needs to 500 calories a day...so he is going to lose a lot of weight during this process. We just don't know why his body is rejecting all the nutrition that we are trying to give it, Hopefully the new testing can come up with some answers.

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