… an upper GI endoscopy with tissue biopsy.  I don’t think I mentioned it, but we concluded in early September that the Dread Pirate Reflux was back in full force.

Honestly, I’m not sure it ever really went away this time.  We took her off of meds in March and, to be honest, she had a runny nose pretty much constantly all summer.  Of course, she also had strep throat twice during that time, and it’s likely that she does have some seasonal allergies, but … in early September she started making this half-throat-clear, half-fake-cough noise that we know means, “my throat hurts ’cause it’s got stomach acid in it” and we put her back on her Prevacid right away.  And lo and behold, the runny nose and the throat-clearing quit.  Of course those are back now that we’ve had cold after cold after cold thanks to school.  But the reflux is back under control.

So on Thursday they’re going to knock her out (yes, this involves general anesthesia) and have a look to see what they can see in her GI tract; they’ll take some tissue biopsies which will tell us if the reflux is being triggered by a food allergy.

Shoshanna has gone through phases of being quite anxious about the procedure.  She knows that she will get medicine so that she’ll take a nap while they use the camera to look at her esophagus & stomach.  She knows that that medicine will be delivered via IV.  And she knows that she will not be allowed to eat breakfast that morning.  She was kind of fixated on the IV thing, because she knows that the scars on the back of her hands are from IVs in the NICU (which you can see if you look closely in the pic above).  I reassured her that I really doubt that this IV will leave a scar, and pointed out that I had two IVs when she was born and don’t have scars from them.  (Which is a lie; if you know where to look you can see where one of them was but I often have trouble finding the mark myself so I don’t think it counts.)  But I think the thing that helped the most was watching a video about IV insertion and reading articles about GERD and going to the hospital on kidshealth.org.  I told her that she can watch/read them again whenever she wants before Thursday.  And we made plans including going out to dinner on Wednesday night wherever she wants, and today we went grocery shopping for things that will be good to eat with a sore throat (double duty there – one of her homeworks this week was to write a shopping list and then go shopping with it).  This morning she told me, “I was scared about my tummy pictures but then we talked about it and now I feel better.”

So stay tuned to hear how it goes, and maybe if you’re all REALLY lucky I’ll post pictures of Shoshanna’s insides.