CF Update

Today Madeline had an appointment at the CF clinic in Salt Lake. She is supposed to routinely visit the clinic every 3 months, and somehow the next visit always comes up much sooner than I had anticipated. I always think, "Didn't we just do this?" And really, we kind of did.

Today's visit was kind of fun because we hadn't been to the clinic at Primary's since last May, right before we went to Europe. (We went to a CF clinic in Pennsylvania two times last fall, so she was still getting her three-month check-ups.) Madeline dazzled everyone with her brilliant smile and her beautiful, curly hair. She is generally pretty low-key about visiting the doctor, but today she was exceptionally calm as she was weighed and poked and prodded and listened to. She did not like the blood draw, but she tried to be so brave about it and let me pretend that it was super cool to see her blood fill up the tube. And now she'll tell you that it's red.

The moral of the visit was that she's doing awesome in most respects. Lungs sound good. Weight gain has slowed down more than they would like, so we're supposed to increase our efforts to make her fat. More cheese, more butter, more olive oil, more Pediasure, more half-and-half, etc. (Weight is important because while it's difficult for people with CF to gain weight, a healthy weight leads to better lung function in the long run.) We'll see what we can do to make her plump up a bit.


They also gave us some larger enzyme capsules to experiment with that have twice the amount of enzymes in one capsule, meaning Madeline would only have to take 2 pills with meals and 1 with snacks instead of 4 and 2. She doesn't mind swallowing 4 pills at a time and is actually quite good at it, so I don't know that this matters one way or the other. The only reason I would care is if she couldn't swallow these new ones, because there's no way I'm going back to the days of opening the capsules and dumping the enzymes onto applesauce. Life is so much easier now. Anyway, we tested the bigger pills out tonight and she swallowed them without much of a problem (we had to remind her not to chew them, but sometimes we have to do that with the smaller ones too). So we'll see.

And since Dave didn't have class today, we topped our clinic visit off with a fun trip to the zoo. There is no better way in this world to make Miss Madeline a happy girl. And just so you know, if you accidentally say that she's a baby, she'll say, "No, girl!"