Noodle Imaging

It wasn’t long after we received the genetic results when we were back in  communication with Dr. Neil, Camden’s Neurologist.  At this point Camden was two and a half years old and we still didn’t seem to have any answers.  Camden had continued to progress, which is great, but he did so at a much slower pace than his peers.  The gap in development seemed to be widening the older he got.  After a lot of consideration we felt it was time to take a look at Camden’s brain.  We had always been hesitant to do this because an MRI at this age requires anesthesia.  We obviously would like to stay away from any unneeded anesthesia but we felt that it may be able to provide some answers.  Camden’s balance was very unsteady and still is to this day.  Not like a typical child first learning to walk, it was much more than that.  Perhaps there could be some minor brain damage that happened in development or during birth; so we decided to take a closer look.

The MRI was booked two days before Thanksgiving in 2016.  I had talked to a few of my friends whose children had received anesthesia at a young age so I would know what to expect.  The toughest part for Camden was that he was unable to eat breakfast that morning and if you know Camden, he LOVES to eat.  We woke him up, got him ready and ran him past the kitchen and into the car.  Craig and I were nervous wrecks the whole morning.

We got to U of M and got checked in.  They brought us back into a triage area and changed him into a gown.  The anesthesia team came into the room and asked us some questions.  At this point in Camden’s life he had pretty severe stranger danger so it was determined that they would give him an oral sedative to relax him prior to wheeling him back for his MRI.

After the sedative kicked in, they handed us a pager that would go off once we were able to come up to recovery; and off he went.  Craig and I went down to the cafeteria to grab a cup of coffee to try to distract ourselves while we waited for his procedure to be complete.  We waited for what felt like 16 days and kept staring at the pager.  I had to remind myself that ‘a watch pot never boils’.  We had a friend that was in the main hospital at U of M at the time so we reached out to him to see if we could go visit him while we waited.  Once we heard back from him we started walking through the halls to the main hospital.  What do you know?  We finally made our way to the main hospital and our pager went off.  His MRI was complete.  We ran back through the hospital to make it back to our little buddy.

Once we got back to the pediatric outpatient procedure floor we were able to meet up with him in recovery.  He was crying when we got to him because he was unsure of where he was and did not know the people who were holding him.  We had a cup of water and some Cheerios ready to go.  The nurses said he did great in the procedure and they said we would be hearing from his Neurologist as soon as the results came in.  They said it could be a couple of days especially with the Thanksgiving Holiday.  We got him dressed and fed and off we went back home.

On the way home my cell buzzed; I looked down and it was a message update from our U of M patient portal, it was from Dr. Neil…

We were relieved that our perfect little guys brain had typical structure with no signs of damage.  Now, where do we go from here?  We just had to wait and see…

Until Next Time,

3 C’s and a K