November 2008 Hypoglycemia & Growth Hormone Deficiency

11/10/08 13 ½ months old


The whole family got the flu. It was of the very nasty variety. Nathan caught it and just couldn’t keep anything down. This was typical for what everyone was experiencing, however he became extremely lethargic. He just didn’t move at all, and seemed almost like a newborn. We began giving him liquids in a dropper, and a spoonful of food every half hour to an hour. When that finally started going down, we began giving him about 2 oz of formula. We were using one of those tiny bottles you get at the hospital when your baby is born. With such a small bottle, I thought that he might be able to hold it himself. So we began working on it. He learned to actually hold his bottle. As he became better and the bottle size slowing increased, he was able to continue holding the bottle. Ben and I are very excited now because he can hold his own bottle!

I took Nathan in to see our pediatrician because I was worried about how much Nathan had lost while he was sick. He hasn’t been gaining weight for the past few months and sickness just made it worse. We have been working on try to control Nathan’s reflux, which may be causing the excessive sweating during eating and his breathing difficulties. The doctor recommended draw blood to check his thyroid, and a number of other things. Everything came back fine except for a low blood sugar reading – glucose 48. We thought it might be a false reading so we went back for another simple sugar test. It was low again (58) showing that he is mildly hypoglycemic.

Yesterday, I took Nathan to the hospital lab so that they could draw blood again for 8 more lab tests and several urine tests. We hope to find out what is causing his low blood sugar. They had to draw his blood three times to get enough. Poor little guy. It was a miserable couple of hours at the hospital. Now we just wait. By Friday, we should have all of the results.

11/24/08

Well, I just got a call from the pediatrician’s office to set up an appointment with the endocrinologist at Primary’s. His blood sugar is still low at 68 but that is the low normal range. The pediatrician thinks that he probably gets hypoglycemic when he is sick. We will have to monitor him closely whenever he gets any dehydrating illnesses. If his sugar gets too low, he will have to be hospitalized. They also found that he has a growth hormone deficiency. We will find out more when we go to the endocrinologist in January.