testing

A couple of weeks ago we were very upset to find out that Harper had a kidney infection. You may remember that she has a history of urinary tract/bladder/kidney infections due to a defect in her urinary tract system, but it had been over a year since she'd had an infection so we were hoping that we were past this. Apparently not.

We got in touch with Harper's urologist and she wanted to either repeat the test she has had in the past (which was traumatic and inconclusive) or do a renal scan. We decided to do the renal scan which means we (well, Tom took her since I can't be exposed to radiation) took her to a radiologist who gave her an IV of something radioactive and then took some scans to see how the kidneys were functioning. The urologist was concerned that this infection, and past infections, had possibly damaged her kidney.

Apparently the IV was quite traumatic, but Harper survived it (while watching Finding Nemo on Tom's iphone) and then the radiology tech freaked us out by saying that one of the kidneys looked balled up (which is apparently bad). However, a couple of days later we heard back from the urologist that the differences were within the normal range and it looks like there is no scarring on the kidneys! Yay! We will meet with the urologist in a few weeks to figure out what we are going to do from here, so for now Harper is back on daily antibiotics (boo) but that is better than having more infections that could damage her kidneys.

Here are a couple of photos of Tom and Harper at Arby's between scans (we had to wait a couple of hours after the IV to get the scans done). She was still a little traumatized, but the bag of Goldfish helped.