The good and the bad of it!

Okay, we had the appointment. It was time to find out the results from the big endocrine test that Emily had done to check to see if her pituitary gland is working properly and to see if any of this is the root of any of her headaches. And as with everything we do, there is good news and bad news. We found out that her stress hormones are just fine and her pituitary gland if functioning properly. That is great news to me. That means that her headaches are not caused from a hormone imbalance in her brain. Although some would think that it would be an easier thing to deal with, I, however, would care to differ on that opinion because having two things wrong with you that are headache causing issues is not something that I want to deal with. I don't always want to be wondering if her headaches are shunt related or hormone related. So the doctor told me that we can now take this report to her neurosurgeon and can focus on getting her shunt fixed. She did ask me what happened after I left her office the last time because Emily was in the middle of that headache episode and she was the one that had called the neurosurgeon and got the ball rolling for us to get answers. I filled her in on what happened that day with the MRI and shunt tap and what we are now facing.

Okay, now for the not so good news about the test results. Even though we found out that the pituitary gland is functioning well, we did find out that Emily does have a growth hormone deficiency. The doctor explained that it is a partial deficiency. Emily is currently measuring at the 3rd percentile on the growth charts. She said that according to the test results, and the charting of Emily's growth rate up until this point, the maximum height that Emily will grow to be will be 4'10 to 4'11. Now, this is IF she is able to maintain her current rate of growth. The doctor did stress to me that children with a growth hormone deficiency, though, often start to drop off the charts at some point during adolescence. If this happens, we will have to address it then and will have to talk about the option of putting Emily on growth hormones and the pros and cons of this. She stressed to me the importance of measuring Emily's growth and tracking it. She wants to see her again in 4 months to see where she is on the charts. She wants me to focus right now on getting Emily's shunt under control and then we'll deal with everything else as we need to.

I am calling the neurosurgeon tomorrow to schedule Emily's surgery for her ICP monitoring. I am going to try and schedule it for the second week of February, if possible. That will be the week after Rob's next Army drill. I'll post another update after I have more details.