Ok, NOT what we were expecting...cyclic vomiting?

It was just a little over a year that I posted a series about my daughter and cyclic vomiting.

If you would like to get caught up, you can check these posts out.

Cyclic Vomiting (part 1)

How Cyclic Vomiting affects my little girl (part 2)

Cyclic vomiting and what we are trying (part 3)

If anything, writing down my thoughts and keeping detailed journals and blogs have helped me to keep track of what we have done, when we have done it, and relay that info on to the doctors in order to best diagnose a treatment path. 

Keeping detailed journals has been SUCH an asset! If you are going through something and the docs can't figure it out and you have more questions than answers you MUST keep a detailed journal or blog. There is no way I would have ever been able to keep everything straight without writing all of this stuff down!

I left off in part 3 where we were trying different things. One was eliminating gluten from her diet. We did and she did seem to get better. We went the longest we have ever gone without a vomiting episode in quite a while when we did that. 

We did (and continue to) see a wonderful doctor at Texas Children's who encouraged us to keep doing what we were doing if it was helping. Our daughter experienced 2 significant growth spurts during this time and the cyclic vomiting was lessening, so obviously we assumed me were on the right track.

Wrong! Well, sort of. I mean, the gluten was causing some of her stomach issues and with that out of the way, other underlying issues surfaced.

She started to have a few more vomiting episodes. Some were associated with accidental gluten ingestion, but others were unexplained and it was the unexplained ones that were wearing on my mind.

How can this be happening? We are doing everything right!

We started noticing, when she drank a coke or other heavily sugared drink, she would tend to have an episode. So, we took her off of all sodas and sugary drinks. The doc said sugar can slow down a person's digestive process and cause some of her symptoms. So, taking her off seemed to help...for a time anyway :/

Even off the gluten, sodas, and other sugary drinks, she was still having unexplained episodes of vomiting that seemed to be happening more frequently despite our best efforts. One thing more prominent now though was her increasing stomach and back pain....in one certain location. 

She would get so bad sometimes that you could even feel a knot or a mass in that area. We assumed it was inflammation of her intestines from something she ate or drank causing that bulge or gas or constipation as had been thrown at us time and time again from her pediatrician. (I never sat well with the constipation idea tho b/c my daughter had frequent bowel movements and was taking in a lot more fluid than she ever had in the past.)

We had a follow up appointment to discuss this with her gastrologist.  My husband and I were beginning to think it was an obstruction of some sort. About a year prior, the gastrologist had written down something called a UPJ obstruction on the white board as a rare, but possible cause to her problems. It was so far down the list that we really didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. Since we had ruled out a lot of the other causes and the issue was still happening, we started to think more and more about it being some sort of intermittent obstruction.

So, we followed up with an ultrasound of the kidneys just to be sure. 

Turns out, she has a UPJ obstruction :/

(more to come in the next post)