Alright, now that everyone is sleeping (add me to that group when I'm done with this post!) here's the cause of our delay on Friday...
On Thursday when the pediatrician was doing her regular check-up she heard a slight heart murmur. She said it was really small and most likely she wouldn't hear it the next day and it wouldn't even be an issue. Well, she did hear it on Friday and thus the long process began. Leah had to have a chest x-ray and an EKG done. The chest x-ray came back normal, but there was a slight abnormality on the EKG. Because of that, she had to have an ultrasound done on her heart. That took like 40 minutes-poor girl! She was such a trooper through it all and hardly cried at all until they pulled the little sticker things off her-I swear they put super strength adhesive on them! Then we had to wait for the pediatric cardiologist to get a chance to look at the results and come over. His office was at Mercy and they were supposedly very busy on Friday. We waited and waited-we even asked if we could just take Leah to him-we'd even get an ambulance, but they said we just needed to wait. About a hour and a half after we finished all the tests he finally showed up. He wasn't even all that friendly or sympathetic to the fact that we were supposed to be discharged at 11:00 and at this point it was well after 3:00. He flipped through her charts some more and then came over and listened to her heart again. He said he could still hear the murmur, but it's what is called an innocent murmur so it's nothing to worry about. Apparently about 50% of babies have a heart murmur of some sort at one time or another. Great, now we can go home, right? Wrong....he then tells us that when the ultrasound was being done he noticed that there appeared to be something in/near the liver that he couldn't quite identify "because I'm a cardiologist so I can't make any positive conclusions, but it may very likely just be the galbladder." So yet another test had to be done-this time an ultrasound of her entire abdomen. That took another 40 minutes, but at least they didn't have to put those terrible stickers on her. Why they had to do an ultrasound of her entire abdomen when it was just the liver in question I'm really not sure. We got back to our room and our nurse came to ask what we found out. We said they didn't tell us anything-the radiologist was going to have to look at the results, call the pediatrician, then she would call our nurse and let us know. Our nurse was really surprised that it was going to take so long. Jake told her it better not last longer than a half hour because we were leaving at 5:30 either way (it was about 5:00 at this point and the roads were horrific as about 6 inches of snow had already fallen and it was still snowing heavily). We already had the car packed and we were ready to go when the nurse came in at 5:20 and said they had heard from the doctor and everything was fine. Woohoo! We finally left the hospital at 5:30. It took us about an hour to get home because of the weather and because we had to meet my sister and brother in-law to pick up Isaac. (Thanks Kristelle and Eric!!!!). Needless to say, it was a long, long day and I was so happy to finally be leaving. I stayed rather calm through it all except for after the heart ultrasound-then I cried and cried-mainly because the radiology tech just kept going and going and didn't say a word. The longer it took, the more worried I became. But after all those tests I think it's safe to say we know our little Leah is about as healthy as they come-and I'm sure we'll have the hospital bill to prove it!
Sorry there's no pictures with this post-I haven't taken any more today and I don't want to wake anyone up just for a picture. I'm sure we'll have more to post soon...
