Follow up with Doc L

We drove in to Houston this morning to see Doc L this afternoon, following up with our concerns from this past weekend about Alan's incision. Doc L confirmed that Alan's incision was still healthy, albeit gooey. She cleaned it a bit with some hydrogen peroxide and a long-handled swab. Alan wiggled a lot at the probing but otherwise handled it better than we expected.

Apparently, a lot of the yuck we've been seeing on the gauze is sweat, sloughing skin cells and other standard gunk that accumulates under any cast. In fact, she was very pleased to see how clean we had been keeping Alan and the cast when she pulled the diaper away to check on things (spica casts are notoriously icky).

She doesn't want us to pack the area, but she sent us home with some supplies to clean and lightly cushion the incision - the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, lots of 2x2 gauze squares and a big box of long-handled swabs. The swabs are one of the items that Doc P keeps by the exam tables and Alan always wants to dive into his supplies when we're there, so when Doc L first started to check Alan's incision with a swab, we told her to give him one as a distraction. He played with that thing for 20 minutes, and Doc L was pretty tickled by his intense concentration in examining it and eventually shredding the cotton tip.

So, we confirmed our next trip back will be the second week of March for scans and hopefully removing the cast. Doc L wants to keep him in the cast a little bit longer, so we'll just have to work hard on keeping him entertained. This morning, he managed to scoot the table in front of him away and turn himself 90 degrees on his seat. Doc L and her PA Kristi agreed that Alan just might be the kid who figures out how to walk in this cast by the time they're ready to take it off.

We took advantage of this unplanned trip back to Houston to have dinner with our friends from the Ronald McDonald House, the Smits from South Africa. They are scheduled to finish Tristan's Proton treatment in two weeks, so having a chance to see them one more time before they head back was a silver lining in the cloud.