Drama

There has been some drama with my little girl lately, and I figured I would update everyone on the situation. About 2 months ago I started to worry about Peyton. She has always been a good eater. And I do mean good. She eats more than her 2 boy cousins who are 10 months and 2 years older than her. I just thought she had a voracious appetite. What made me start to worry was the fact that she seemed fixated on food. From the minute she woke up to the minute she went to sleep, she was almost constantly asking me for food. She would eat 3 LARGE meals, plus one big snack when she woke up from her afternoon nap, and still she was constantly following me around, asking me for food. At home, she mostly stayed in the kitchen; she wouldn't play with me or her toys, she just tried every way she could think of to get food. When we went out to various play places (the park, Papa's Pizza, Pump it Up Jr, the Children's Museum) she wouldn't ever go play, she would just stay by me asking for food. If I didn't give her food, she would walk around asking for food- even from complete strangers. I definitely didn't think this was normal. In the beginning of November, I took her in to her doctor to see if we could figure out the problem. He ordered 4 stool samples and 3 tubes of blood work, which we did that week. The blood work (for her vital organ functions) came back normal, and most of her stool samples came back normal, but the test for fat came back positive, which meant she had fat in her stool, which is definitely not normal. Usually your body either burns off fat, or stores it in the body, but you're not supposed to have fat in the stool. This worried her doctor, because that is an indicator of cystic fibrosis. Scary. So we went and had 2 more stool samples done (one for liver enzymes, one for a parasite) and they both came back normal. Then we did the sweat Chloride test, for cystic fibrosis, and thankfully that came back normal, too. So after 2 weeks of tests (and lots of tears and prayers), we now know that everything is fine with our little baby- she just isn't absorbing nutrients, so she will probably just have to be on a supplement until her little body outgrows this problem. We go in to see a specialist (pediatric gastroendonologist) at the end of the month, and he will be the one to take care of the supplement. I am so happy to know that nothing is wrong with Peyton, and I'm so grateful that we live in a time where we have the medical knowledge to figure all this stuff out!