May 4, 2010 - 1:00pm

Day 9
Surgery Results
Ali is out of surgery and did very well according to Dr. Vo.  Although (unfortunately) he did not see anything out of the ordinary :( to fix. He did say her arteries were indeed very small at this age and it may just be too small to see. He will look over the pictures again  later today, and then again in a day or two to see if anything jumps out at him that he may initially missed.  He did take some blood samples of the blood coming out of the kidneys and those will be sent off to a lab for specialized testing - which will take a week or so for results... if this shows an unbalance in the kidney production it can isolate which kidney to really concentrate on in the future.  Although the test is not always conclusive. So, he also said he was also very encouraged that when she was under the anesthesia that her blood pressure came right down, so it is something we should be able to control (we have also noticed it is down more when she has taken some benedryl at night to help sleep).   He would like to see her again in a year - when she is 4 - as the vessels over that time seem to increase in size quite a bit and easier to diagnose.
Since we haven't got any concrete evidence that renal artery stenosis is indeed the cause of ALL of this I am a little skeptical that that has indeed caused all of this, but we have found nothing else, and they have put her through just about every test imaginable.  There are certain things that have pointed toward renal artery stenosis (like the affect of captopril on her blood pressure), but they have not been able to see it at this time.  We hope that at once we get her home she will be less stressed and her blood pressure will come down some anyway.  We have been here long enough that every time a doctor or nurse walks in, or we go to another room (for some other test) she gets upset.  I have read of other kids having similar symptoms at some of the medical forums online, with no one ever figuring out what was wrong (none that have gotten the extensive testing that Allison has) and after about 4 weeks the symptoms going away on their own and the kids returning to normal as well.  Hopefully when we get home she will start to return to her normal bubbly self.  I'll be encouraged when she gets her appetite back and begins to eat again, as of now she doesn't really want anything to do with food and we will have to continue to feed her with her NG tube...  From time to time she still tells us that her tummy hurts.  Hard to tell what kind of "hurt" as she can't really tell us - could just be a nauseous after her medications or could be something else.  Anyway I hope she is well enough in a few days to go home and the comforts of home speed her recovery so we can have our little laughter machine back... :)