Endoscopy #3

Oliver had another endoscopy earlier this week. We've added a few foods to his diet since the last one, so we wanted to check to see how his esophagus was doing with the new foods.

His last endoscopy was done in December of 2010, when he was 18 months old and still young enough that we didn't feel like we needed to go to great lengths to explain what was going on. Now, he is close to three years old, so we felt like he needed to understand that this wasn't going to be a typical doctor appointment! He did much better than we could have imagined. I think the fact that it was so early in the morning (we had to be there for pre-op at 6:30 am) helped, because he seemed to be too tired to cry when they wheeled him back! He did wonderfully coming out of anesthesia as well.

Visually, we are still seeing the same furrows in his esophagus that have been there during the other scopes (see this link for a picture of furrowing, a normal esophagus would have a smooth appearance).  We also think we see some white plaques in the pictures given to us, be we certainly don't know for sure. Though this damage is caused by the eosinophils, its presence doesn't automatically mean that he has eosinophils currently present in his esophagus. We, however, are concerned that the damage has not at all gone away since he supposedly had been eating all safe foods for a little over a year. Our reading and research would lead us to believe that in such a young child, the damage could be healed by now.

Several biopsies were taken, as having a pathologist look at those is the only way to know for certain if there are eosinophils present. The eosinophil counts from the biopsies will give us guidance as we choose the next steps for Oliver, and we should have those in the next few days.