Smartest. Baby. Ever.

One of the odd quirks about having surgery done at a world class hospital is that those hospitals tend to be teaching hospitals.  Which also means that the doctors are simultaneously awesome doctors and medical faculty.  In order to be an academic, one has to publish research.  And who better to do research on than your patients!  I think it’s standard at teaching hospitals for the patients to be asked to be a part of like a kabillion studies.  We were approached about participating in 3 of them (I think), 2 of which I remember, and 1 of which we decided to participate in.  And when it’s 24 hours before your 3-day old has open heart surgery, 3 is a pretty good approximation for infinity.

The winner of our particular study lottery is researching how being on a heart-lung bypass machine at less than a week old can affect future brain development.  As it turns out, stopping a heart can lead to oxygen deprivation in the brain (who’d have thought?), and having oxygen deprivation in your brain at 3 days old can cause developmental issues down the road.  So they gave him their drug (some existing drug that’s supposed to stimulate red blood cell production) or a placebo (don’t know which), did a brain MRI before surgery, a brain MRI after surgery, monitored blood oxygen saturation during surgery and did a developmental test in his first month of life.  Rinse and repeat for surgery #2.  Then the plan was to do more developmental tests at 1 year old, at 3 years old, and at 5 years old.

This past Monday was the 1 year developmental checkup.  Basically, they gave him some standard baby things to do, and he did them.  Then they gave him some basic reading and arithmetic.  Then more advanced reading, basic differential calculus, and an IQ test (his resulting IQ was about 270).  Then they just gave him a pencil and some paper and he went ahead and proved Fermat’s last theorem. (He later told me that he thought Fermat’s birthday was the August 15th and that he was trying to be funny.  Turns out Fermat’s birthday is the 17th.  Oops.  I don’t think the tester caught the joke.)  When it was over the tester said, “well I certainly don’t see any developmental issues.”  I guess she was being sarcastic.  I’m sure she meant to say that he’s the smartest baby she had ever encountered.

Winning!

One Year Checkup, Part Deux

I’m sure after reading about the cardiology one year checkup a couple weeks ago, you were all wondering, “OMG WHAT ABOUT THE PEDIATRICIAN?  SURELY THERE’S ANOTHER DOCTOR UPDATE!!”  Well never fear, we have plenty of doctor’s appointments and I am happy to post a report on each one.  The truth is, good defined milestones for posting these things aren’t always obvious (I mean, if I posted every time David did something cute, Google would run out of storage), but I know that when there’s a doctor’s appointment, I should post.

This past Tuesday was the 12 month pediatric checkup.  After David had finished running some game on the nurses and thoroughly exploring the room we were in, the doctor came in.  He looked at the chart, and basically the first thing he says is, “Looks like his growth has slowed a little more than we’d like.”  I didn’t need to look over at Christy to know that she was having the same internal reaction that I was.  Namely, “If we have to have another knock down fight with a doctor about feeding David, I’m going to hit someone.”

You see, at TCH after the first surgery, they were VERY paranoid about him not growing fast enough.  So paranoid, in fact, that they presumed a massive problem would be there even before it happened.  And I mean, I understand that his heart is less efficient than normal, and that he’s going to burn more calories than normal.  I really understand.  But after we’ve told one doctor, “no, we’re not going to add formula to his breast milk, Christy is just going to nurse him unless we actually SEE a growth problem,” I’d hope that they’d write that down and that would be the end.  Of course, people are stupid, so they never do things that make sense.  It literally took Christy telling one of them, “GFY, I’m nursing him.” before they just left it alone at the hospital.  And then, of course, every time we went back for a checkup they would AGAIN inform us that we needed to be fortifying his milk EVEN THOUGH HIS GROWTH WAS NORMAL.  So, needless to say, we are somewhat touchy about this particular issue.

Back to Tuesday.  So the doctor is worried about his growth.  He asks what we’re feeding him.  We tell him.  He says, “well you’re going to think this sounds a little crazy (Paul and Christy brace for impact), but I need you to add some heavy cream to his oatmeal in the morning.  Or butter, if you feed him grits.”  That's it? Really?  He just wants us to make sure we’re feeding David enough.  He did ask for us (read: Christy) to keep a log of what David eats and to bring it back in 2 weeks.  I was shocked at the level of sanity.  From the way he talked, it sounded like he has the same opinion of dietetics that we do - basically that it’s junk science.  Seriously, these are the people who have made America the most obese and unhealthy place in the world, why the hell should we listen to anything they say?  But I digress.

The nutshell version of all of that is that David should be 20 lbs instead of 18.5 (he’s basically been on the 5% growth curve since he was born), that we need to supplement some of his meals with butter and/or cream, and that we have to keep a log of his food for 2 weeks.  The logging isn’t particularly exciting (we have done enough logging, thank you very much), but I guess it could be worse.  For his part, David is enjoying the new diet.  He gets oatmeal with coconut milk (delicious btw) or cheese grits in the mornings, he had indian food swimming in butter on tuesday evening, and today he had grilled wild coho salmon with a side of creamed spinach for lunch.  The docs always said that he’d be skinny.  I guess we will see.

Obligatory David Picture