Little Joaquin is doing much better after his first surgery. He wasn't able to go home last Monday after his surgery because they could only operate on 1 vocal chord and still had the other one to do. He also had to stabilize a bit because when they took his breathing tubes out last Saturday, he was running a fever for several days. They did every sort of test on him that they could and everything was coming out normal, but with a fever, they couldn't operate again. Finally on Tues. or Wed. they figured out that it was a urinary tract infection causing the fever which on one hand was great news because it wasn't something respiratory and it is easy to take care of.
So Saturday they took him to surgery to see how his throat was healing. I guess they found him in good condition because they decided to operate on his other vocal chord and now he really does get to go home tomorrow! This is wonderful news as he has been in the hospital, in ICU, for 3 weeks now. He still has a long road of recovery ahead...he has to learn how to walk again, etc. because the paralyzing drugs really took their toll on him. But he is past the worst. He can't go back to jardín (pre-school) because of the high risk of getting sick from the other children, so now he will stay at home with a nana while Silvana works. We are all so happy that Joaquin made it through and thanks to you all who kept him and Silvana in your thoughts!!!
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My 5 year old son just had a UTI a few months ago. His Pediatrician wanted us to get additional tests run as soon as the infection went away but at first I didn't want to put him through it but she explained "I have 5 girls a week that come through here with UTIs and I've had 4 boys my entire 30 years of practicing. 2 of the boys came from another Dr and this was a subsequent UTI. After the first UTI their Dr told them not to worry about it and just see if they got another one. When they came to see me with their 2nd UTI I sent them for testing and they had SIGNIFICANT kidney damage." This was enough to convince us to do the testing which consisted of a sonogram and a catheter and x-rays. Turns out that my son has severe reflux on the left side where urine travels back up from his kidney to his bladder. His left kidney is damaged and they need to remove half of it and fix his ureter on the left side so it does not reflux. He also has slight reflux on the right side so they are going to fix that ureter too. Had we waited to get the testing he could have lost an entire kidney or worse.
While a UTI seems common (for girls it is) and is treatable it is VERY VERY VERY (can't stress that enough) rare for boys to get them. It almost always indicates a structural abnormality. It’s not typically the UTI that causes the damage (although if they have enough of them it can and the Urologist explained to me that a lot of Doctors diagnose UTIs as ear infections mistakenly but by the time you take the antibiotics for that the UTI is gone). In my son’s case it was his reflux that caused damage to his kidney but had he not gotten the UTI and had we not gotten the testing we would have never known. My son is having surgery on the 12th and I wrote a post on this previously (http://cincinnatichile.blogspot.com/2009/06/da-vinci-reason-im-glad-im-not-in-chile.html).
PLEASE pass this information along to Joaquin’s mother and urge her to push them for additional tests if they are not doing so already. If either of you want to contact me for more information you can email me at
cincinnatichile@gmail.com. I just created this email address so that I can post the address here without giving my first and last name to the public. I was praying for them while he was in surgery and I will continue to. Thanks for keeping us updated.
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