cat scan

today we went in to providence hospital to have the cat scan done on talan's dermoid cyst. he still had the slight cold that delayed the procedure by a week but he was good enough to have it done. wednesday evening hayden came down with a fever and all i could think was that talan would have it before we made it in today. but he didn't!
i woke talan up at about 11:45pm last nite in order to get him to fill his stomach up since he wouldn't be able to eat after midnite. he took pretty much the whole 8 ounce bottle and went right back to sleep. i actually don't think he really ever woke up in the first place. he woke up this morning at about 5am and cried until we got him out of bed at a little after 6am. my mom was able to hold him and play with him and make him stop crying which i didn't think would happen. i figured he'd be screaming until he was knocked out or he got a bottle in his mouth.
we left the house at about 6:40am and he ended up falling asleep on the car ride there. he woke up a bit after getting there but was still really good. we sat in the waiting area waiting to be taken in for "surgery" for awhile and eventually he fell back asleep.
the drug doctor's came in to get us and explained just what they were going to do. we were allowed to go down to the cat scan room with him and i was even allowed to hold him while they stuck his leg. i passed him over to the dr.'s and then they let us wait just outside the room. they didn't get him in there until about 8:50, so almost an hour late. but they were back out about 10 minutes later and he was already starting to wake up a bit. they said the last few shots he started moving a bit but the pictures came out clear so it was all good.
they had to put an iv in him because the dr. wanted the cat scan "with contrast" so they needed the dye in him. if he didn't need the iv, they said it would have been even quicker and easier.
they brought us up to the recovery room where a nurse sat with us while he was waking up. he was totally out of it, but after a while he started moving more and more. he very slowly ended up taking about 5 ounces of his bottle and the nurse released us probably a little after 10:30am.
the nurse told us we should call the plastic surgeon and see if maybe we could get a rush on things and try to get the cyst removed before the new year since our deductible has been met for 2007. she said they most likely would be able to do it. unfortunately, when i got home and made the call, i found out that his dr. is out of the office until january 3, so that's just not a possibility. it's ok since it would have been a major rush to have christmas, rainah's 1st birthday, hayden's 5th birthday and a surgery on top of it. but it would have been nice not to have to worry about it or the cost of it!
we left the hospital and headed to my parents to pick hayden up and then we headed home. i was expecting a "low key" day with talan being groggy and tired most of the day. not long after getting home, talan started crawling under the christmas tree and crawling towards all the things he shouldn't be touching. so much for a low key day.
he did end up finally going down for his afternoon nap and slept for quite awhile. he's now upstairs crawling around acting like every other day. i really breed tough boys.
of course, i couldn't leave my camera behind. so now poor talan has to live with photo's of himself in a half awake state. i'm sorry talan. that's what happens when you have a mom that blogs.
thanks for all the thoughts and prayers. they certainly helped! i was sure we'd go in there with a screaming baby, but instead, he charmed all of the dr.'s and nurses the way he charms people every other day of the week.
by the way, they weighed him when we first got there and was was 19 pounds 8 ounces. not too bad, but hayden still had him beat. at 9 months hayden was 21 pounds 3.5 ounces. i don't think talan will be gaining that much in the next couple of weeks! although, it is christmas.


waiting to be taken in. the next time he wakes up in the middle of the nite, no way am i getting him. look at how pleasant he is and he hadn't eaten in about 8 hours!:

talan just out of the cat scan:
dazed and confused:


waking up a bit more and finally able to eat a bit:


what are these things and how do i get them off?!:

surprise! he got sick

the other day i posted about how talan would be going in for a cat scan on wednesday, which would be tomorrow. so yesterday afternoon someone from providence calls me to ask me all of these questions and inform me that we need to be there by 7AM and he cannot eat anything past midnite. yeah, that's going to go well.
so she asks me if he's had a cold recently. well, no. but his brother has one and we're crossing our fingers he doesn't pick it up before tomorrow.
then i put him to bed and he suddenly couldn't breath. snot was pouring out of his nose and he couldn't get comfortable or get any kind of good sleep. wonderful. he needed to stay well just one more day and he couldn't even do that.
so i was making phone calls all morning trying to figure out if he was still allowed to go in with a cold. for whatever reason, nobody could really answer my questions. i was passed from department to department until i was finally told it would be best if i rescheduled because if he coughed or sneezed and moved we'd have to do it all over again anyway. then came the hundred and two phone calls in order to reschedule the appointment. another thing nobody could help me with.
i finally got to the right person and they rescheduled our appointment for next friday, the 21st at 8am. which again means no eating after midnite and be there by 7am. awesome. hopefully by then this cold will pretty much be gone and no new illnesses will attack.
this afternoon we went to the pediatrician for hayden's 5 year check up. so i asked her really quickly about the cyst. she said that looking at it she was sure it was just a dermoid cyst. so i told her the plastic surgeon said the same thing but that it could be attached to the tissue surrounding the brain. she told me that sometimes it can be attached to the bone, so in order to remove it, a neurosurgeon would be there as well. but then she went on to say that only about 90% of dermoid cysts are attached to the bone like that. she said that she has probably only seen 1 in the past 12 years and she would be pretty surprised if she had just seen another. however, it is talan, so neither of us would be THAT surprised.
so yeah. things were cleared up a little bit more with her explanation. it seems like the chances are pretty slim that it is attached to anything but they need the cat scan to make sure.
so there's the update. we'll let you know how things go next friday. if we make it there, that is.

8 months

i'm sure i say it in every month blog, but i honestly can't believe talan is 8 months old already.
talan has gone through all of his vegetables and fruits and has now made it on to turkey and chicken. no allergic reactions, just a distaste for fruits. he will usually take them, but only if you feed them to him first. he typically will eat about 2 jars for lunch and dinner. so you need to feed him a jar of fruit and then the jar of vegetables. if you do it the other way around, you'll never get him to eat the fruit. even then, there are still times he makes horrible faces and refuses to eat them. applesauce seems to be his favorite out of the fruits with bananas and peaches giving him the hardest time. the turkey and chicken have gone down no problem either.
we have recently tried giving him a few solid foods as well. i guess dave gave him an animal cracker one day WITHOUT TAKING PICTURES and i did the same about a week later, this time with a camera of course. he will gnaw at them until they pretty much fall apart. we tried giving him some fruit puffs but he made a face like "this is the worst thing in the world" so i bought him some vegetable puffs to try instead. he also didn't care for them. i tried one of the biter biscuits this evening and after gnawing on it for a few he then just decided to slam it on his highchair tray.
i actually am not even sure when you are supposed to give them solid food like that. but i realized this evening that he just isn't ready for solid food. then i read the biter biscuit box and saw that it said to give to a child 10+ months and that crawls with his belly up off the floor. yeah, we'll try again later i guess.
the one thing he does love to eat is paper. anytime he sees paper he heads straight for it. he's probably eaten at least 3 little pieces so far. i've turned coupons in with corners chewed off and had christmas cards with a little bite taken out of them. in hayden's room, he finds every little piece of paper anywhere on his floor. christmas could just be his favorite holiday if only for the fact that there will be paper EVERYWHERE!!!! yum. yum.
talan sits perfectly now and doesn't ever fall over unless he purposely does it. he now also scoots himself which is more or less crawling. he'll get up on his knees and rock but then just fall to his stomach and start crawling like a snake. this evening he made it from the living room all the way to the back of the house to hayden's bedroom. the gates need to be cleaned and brought upstairs right away! the pictures posted above? yeah, those were insanely impossible to get this evening. he can't sit still for a second. he just wanted to roll over and get to whatever else was going on. i can't imagine what the next few months pictures will turn out like!
his sleeping has gotten much better. he typically goes to bed around 8pm and still usually gets up around 11 or 11:30. sometimes you can just stick the binky back in his mouth and he'll fall back asleep, other times he must be fed. but then he typically won't get up until 5:30 or so. and after he eats then, he'll go back to sleep until well after 7...sometimes close to 9.
he doesn't need to be swaddled anymore at nite, but i still swaddle his legs during naps. he usually takes a morning nap for a couple of hours and then his afternoon nap from about 1-3. i would certainly like him to sleep from 8-7 at nite, but it's not as bad as it was.
he still loves his jumper in the basement and goes in it almost every day when dave comes home from work. hayden likes to entertain him by falling down or throwing things at himself to make talan crack up. they still really love each other, although hayden doesn't like the fact that talan can now get around and get to his stuff. he's not so big on sharing.
talan has rediscovered his tongue and loves to stick it out and do cute little baby tongue tricks with it. he also has been smacking his lips to make funny little noises. hayden thinks this is hilarious, and i can't really disagree.
he doesn't wave so much on command anymore, but he claps all the time. he'll also shake his head "no" at you when prompted. i'm trying to teach him "yes" but that's not working so well right now.
talan is still a super happy baby and doesn't have any problems leaving my sight or going to other people. i'm hoping this continues, as hayden was always the same way. it sure makes things easier.
he seems to be "turning the corner" as dave said, in the weight department. hayden was a super chunk and we think talan is starting to become that way. you can see in pictures that the two of them are just built differently, but talan's face is getting chunkier and his legs are super solid tree stumps as well. it'll be interesting to see where is weight is at the next time he goes in.
he's headed in for a cat scan to check out his cyst on wednesday so that's the biggest thing he has going on right now. they will be able to let us know if the cyst is connected to the brain tissues or not.
we visited santa on friday and as we figured, talan did great. he is a grabber though. the second i pick him up, he grabs my hair and won't let go. so i placed him in santa's lap, turn my back to walk over near the camera, and when i turn back around i notice santa desperately trying to get his beard free from talan's death grip. once he was freed everything went well. he wasn't in a very smiley mood, but he was ok to sit there (well, squirm there i guess you could say).
we're so excited for talan's first christmas. hayden was 5 days from being a year old for his first, as rainah will be this year. so it will be a little different having a slightly younger one. good thing we have hayden to help us open all of talan's presents!
happy 8 months, talan!

and yet another trip to providence southfield

as reported in an earlier blog, talan has a cyst in his eye socket. his dr. told us that he would need to have it removed at some point by plastics but due to his age, they usually wait. she told us we should make an appointment to see them so that they can take a look at it and know how quickly it may be growing from this appointment to the next.
because our deductible has been met this year, i got him in for an appointment right away as 2008 is almost here. the dr. came in and right away said what our dr. said. it's a dermoid cyst. he tried to explain what exactly a dermoid cyst is and told me that basically it is a "mistake" that forms during development. he then proceeded to say "i don't want to scare you. i mean, it isn't serious. well, no. it isn't DANGEROUS." he told me that the cyst could be connected to the tissues surrounding the brain. he would need a cat scan in order to determine if this is case or not. if it is not connected to the tissues, they would easily be able to remove it. if it is connected, they will have to come up with a slightly different approach to removing it.
he let me know that it is not cancer, nor will it ever be cancer. he also said that they don't really have a certain age that they wait for in order to remove it, but they aren't in any real rush either. he said we should have the cat scan done in order to find out just what we are up against. then we can sit down and come up with our plan of attack.
a cat scan for us is no big deal, but for a baby it is a slightly bigger deal. we needed to have several departments coordinate their schedules as talan is going to need to be put under. so once everyone coordinated, they called and told us he was set up for the cat scan on wednesday, december 12 at 8am in southfield.
yeah! that means we get to leave the house by about 7:15 unless they tell us that we need to be there even earlier. so on wednesday we'll be headed back to providence southfield. i guess he's been missing the place since he hasn't been there since he was 6 weeks old when he had pneumonia.
i'm not really worried right now. i understand it's not life threatening, but of course it's never fun to hear your 8 month old's cyst may be connected to brain tissue. right now it's most upsetting to think about our happy little baby having to be put under for the cat scan. this kid has had it all done to him!
so that's where we're at right now. we'll have the cat scan and then wait to hear what the dr. has to say. at this point, i'm guessing they won't be able to remove it before 2008, so that will just mean our deductible will most likely be met another year when that happens.
we'll keep you posted.