Left on Longwood

In nearly three years of visiting Children's (thanks to prenatal echos that started when I was five or six months pregnant with Annie), I had never driven into the hospital myself. It was a typical rush-hour drive on Tuesday morning, on our way to a 9:15 appointment to check Annie's teeth and make sure everything was ok. I laughed at the GPS when I first put in the address to Children's and I was given an arrival time of less than an hour later. HAH! I just watched that estimated arrival time get later and later and later. I left the house at 7am and just made it in time for the appointment. I was very happy to hear the GPS say "Left on Longwood" at last!

Murphy's Law -- first time traveling alone and I had some excitement. Annie decided to get sick just as I was taking the Storrow Drive exit (folks around here will know what that means!) and turned a deep red as she spluttered and coughed after throwing up. Two seconds of wondering where the heck I could pull over (answer: nowhere!) and she managed to come out of it. I noticed the poor kid had red spots all around her eyes and even down her cheeks from it, though, and required a quick change of clothes before we rushed up to the dental department.

Otherwise, though ... Annie is terrific. You'd never know she went through anything last week. She is proud to show her teeth to anyone and everyone, and points to them and says "doctor." She is cranky, but I'm sure that has everything to do with the two new molars she has cut this week. Dr. Nelson saw them when we went back for a post-op visit on Tuesday morning. (Sigh. They'll be the next ones to get crowns, I suppose.) Everything looks great, according to Dr. Nelson. She did caution me that one of the molars is "iffy," explaining that they were conservative and didn't do a root canal on it. We won't know for a year or so if that was the right call, so she may still lose that one molar. From where we started this dental adventure -- being told all of her baby teeth had to be extracted! -- losing one molar seems pretty acceptable and minor. And, as you can see from the photos, the chip on her front tooth is no longer an issue!

So ... back to working on her feeding, chewing and swallowing. We are pretty tired of the bottle thing around here, and ready to get rid of them! I will be calling Annie's ENT, Dr. Rahbar, this week to see where we are. We haven't checked in with him since the MRI (the sometimes-a-dimple-is-just-a-dimple MRI) and need to know if another swallow study should be scheduled. Meanwhile, Annie continues to receive speech and physical therapy weekly. It seems like she is making progress ... it is just so, so slow. Still, progress is progress and we're happy for it. She is a funny, funny kid! She thanks me every time I change a dirty diaper (not wet, just dirty gets a "yucka! tank oooo!"), says "Ta Da" about twenty times each day, and thinks all the world is her stage.