Scope

I can't believe it has been a week since I blogged! This week went by too fast. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were full of so many fun things! We got to spend time with both of my brothers and their lovely ladies on different nights. Bonus, they brought dinner to us! They are all pretty great. :) Sunday we celebrated one of my favorite people's birthday eating Chinese Dim Sum and it was super yummy. Then all 6 of us crashed with stomach flu together in the middle of the night. Oh my... It sucked. Thankfully 12 hours later all the kids were fine, Ryan took about 24 hrs and of course I took longest. By Tuesday night the house was disinfected and we were back to normal life! But it's made this week weird and short.

The most amazing thing happened this week though. Tuesday Nevin saw the ENT nurse practitioner at Cardinal Glennon to have his soft palette scoped to see what is really going on with his mouth. We have been waiting for almost a year to do this procedure because he needed to have more vocabulary to accomplish what they needed to see to see if they can fix anything. We have been prepping him for a week with nasal spray and talking endlessly about seeing Loretta and putting a camera in his nose to see his boogers (come on, he's a boy!). I was terrified for the procedure and that if he threw a fit all data would be useless and we would need to do xRays of his mouth and that would not be good or as helpful. When we arrived we had the nicest nurse come in and chat with us. First they needed to put spray in his nose and have him swallow it to numb the area. She let him spray the bottle a few times to see that it wasn't scary, we talked about how it would taste like tooth paste and how much he loves tooth paste (he really does, he would just eat a tube of it if I was stupid enough to let him), that it would feel just like the nasal spray at home. One, two, three, ready or not here comes the spray! Amazing. No tears, no fighting, he took it like a man. We gave him 5 minutes to get over any kind of attitude and then Loretta came in with lots of presents and suckers that he could only have if he was good and said all the things she asked him to say. He climbed up into the nurses lap, let the ENT put the camera in his nose and he intently watched the TV screen of his nose and palette and was totally intrigued by watching everything in his mouth move! It was insane how good he was. I mean, if someone stuck a camera up your nose you would probably want to punch them, right? He just understand what was going on and that he really wanted that red sucker. We finally got an awesome picture of how his soft palette moves or lack of movement and closure. I feel justified. For years I have said something was wrong and have been told by multiple doctors that nothing was wrong he just needed more speech therapy. Well, there is something wrong! His palette does not do what it is supposed to do and now we know what we are working with. We need to wait for the surgeon to review the data and determine what our next step is. We might need to do more speech therapy and review in 6 months or more. I am hopeful that he will be a good candidate for surgery to repair his palette so that it can achieve the closure that it needs for him to make the proper sounds and not sound like he talks out of his nose.  We are so much closer than we have ever been and I'm so thankful for that. We need some good news for this sweet boy who works so hard to be understood and heard.