(no subject)

[rivka]

Alex had her one-year pediatrician's appointment yesterday.

He heard a heart murmur.

This is probably no big deal. He says so ("If there were a serious cardiac abnormality, she would be weak and sickly - which she's obviously not."), my sister the pediatrician says so, and Dr. Google says so. Apparently, it is fairly common for children between the ages of 1 and 5 to have a heart murmur for a while. After I posted a plea for innocuous heart murmur stories to plan_survive yesterday, several people chimed in making them sound utterly unremarkable.

And yet.

We have an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist on the 26th of May. It's possible that she'll be able to diagnose what they call an "innocent murmur" just from listening to Alex's heart, and will send us on our merry way. If not, she'll need to have an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart.

I am mostly succeeding in not freaking out about it, but it's definitely on my mind. I am relieved that the cardiologist's scheduler was able to find a cancellation, because originally she offered me an appointment in September. (Can you imagine? Boy, it's a good thing we don't live in Canada, where their evil socialized medicine has led to long waits for medical treatment.)

A heart murmur.

She's still in the 90th percentile for height; frankly, I'm starting to wonder whether she's really mine. Her weight curve has dropped a bit, from about the 75th percentile to the 60th. Her doctor thinks that's normal for the toddler era, when kids' exercise level increases and their interest in food decreases. We had a long, reassuring talk about the vagaries of the toddler appetite. Alex eats a good variety of food, but the quantities are often minute. His analysis essentially boiled down to this: toddlers don't starve to death, but we have no idea why not.

He said that we should just continue to offer a variety of healthy foods, and not stress about whether or not she eats them. Most of the toddler feeding problems he sees result from parents trying to compensate for poor intake, either by letting the child drink their meals (tons of juice or milk) or by filling them up with junk food because "at least she's eating something." I think we can avoid both of those traps.

He talked about accident prevention ("this is something that worries me far more than her heart murmur..."), the advisability of weaning her to a cup by fifteen months (already on my agenda), developmental milestones (he was impressed that she can feed herself if handed a spoonful of food), and discipline (he confirmed our opinion that it's time to start having some gentle expectations). He referred us to an ophthalmologist, because both Michael and I had strabismus as children, but said we didn't need to worry about seeing a dentist until she's three.

Then he sent us to the lab, where Alex had a blood draw (for a blood lead level, although they also do a CBC) and two vaccinations. That part was hard. When she was an infant, she'd stop crying as soon as I picked her up after her shots. Now it isn't like that. She fears, and then afterward she resents. The blood draw was particularly hard, because they stuck her finger and then had to keep squeezing and squeezing to pull blood up in the capillary tube. Yeesh. I was relieved that, in contrast to kcobweb's account of three extra staff people coming into the room to hold her baby down, Alex got to sit on my lap and be restrained by me and Michael. I wrapped my arms around her arms and chest and tucked her feet between my knees, and Michael held her legs still for the shots. Poor baby, she wore herself out with the effort of coping, and fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Boy, it's a good thing we don't live in Canada, where their evil socialized medicine has led to long waits for medical treatment.

Yep. It's so much better when the Invisible Hand(tm) takes care of everything for us.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

If we had had to wait five months to discover whether Alex had a significant heart problem, at least we could've been cheered by the fact that, because of our wait, a private corporation would be richer.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you can find a doctor in India who'll listen to her heartbeat over the phone...

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Actually, speaking as a Canadian, I should probably point out that evil socialized medicine generally means long waits for non-life-threatening, non-urgent complaints. If the doctor thinks it's a big deal, they'll get you an appointment with a specialist pronto. If they think it possibly *can* wait, then it'll take quite a while. So, yeah, our system is pretty good for car accidents, heart attacks, etc. but not so good with stuff like hip replacements and other surgeries which don't require immediate attention but are very painful. The one time I was referred to a specialist and my GP's office said they'd gotten me an appointment for less than a week away, I flew into a panic, convinced I must be dying. And as it turned out, I had a problem which turned out to be quite mild, but whose symptoms are extremely similar to something life-threatening.

So, yeah, if a Canadian pediatrician were just dotting his i's and crossing his t's, then if Alex lived here she probably would take months to get an appointment. But if he thought the murmur indicated a serious problem, she'd be seeing that cardiologist lickety-split, and some other kid would get bumped out of their non-lifethreatening appointment slot. When a friend of the family's daughter turned out to have a brain tumour, she was sent for a CAT scan the same day as she saw the pediatrician about her symptoms, was admitted to hospital that same night, and had surgery the next day. So, presumably somebody else who wasn't considered to be in as much danger was bumped from the CAT scan, and bumped from the operating room.

Hey, I never said it was a perfect system.

[phantom_wolfboy]

And of that, many of the problems we now have are due to long years of starvation of the system (by underfunding) by conservative politicians enamoured of the American system.