Lung Update | {shoulder shrug}

We went back to the pulmonologist for our follow up this morning and got to see the cool moving picture of Savannah’s lung via the CT scan.

I will say it’s nice to hear your specialist come in and say “Man, this is going to be an easy one today!”. As the doctor pointed out, there is SOMETHING going on in the upper part of her lungs. A few of her airways had been closed off for a portion of time, which damaged them and caused them to look kind of strand-like on the x-ray and CT Scan. They checked for masses, they checked for enlarged lymph nodes, obvious signs of an infection, they checked for serious lung disease and found…none of those.

So in the words of Dr. Scalo “It’s a bit of a mystery, but this kid seems to be doing OK” {Hands up/shoulder shrug}. A possible step we could take if she was running a lot of fevers or had multiple bouts of pneumonia would be a ‘lung lavage’, which sounds like a lovely spa treatment for the lung, but is where they would put her under general anesthesia and scrape some cells out of her lungs for analysis. As it’s a bit invasive, he didn’t recommend it at this time. It also has only about a 20% probability of telling them anything new at this point, so we’re skipping it in favor of a simple chest X-ray in 12 months. If things have gotten worse at that point, then we’ll look into more testing.

Hoo-Ray!

In the meantime, we just have to watch for more lung symptoms like lots of night coughing, wheezing, coughing after exercise and repeated lung infections. So far, so good!

It is obviously not affecting her as she doesn’t have shortness of breath or chronic coughing. A definitive answer would have been nice, but I think this is about as good as it gets right now, so we’ll take it happily.