Oops...its been a while

Where do I start? Since the last time I posted everything has been crazy! Lilly had another UTI a mere 2 weeks after the last one..so we were sent to see a Urologist at Children's hospital in New Orleans. They ran two test, a renal ultrasound, which Lilly did amazing for they let her lay on her tummy on my tummy (does that make sense?) and they did the majority of it through her back so she was able to "talk" to mommy and play with my face the whole time. Then we did a VCUG, they injected a contrast dye into her bladder and took x-rays to check for Kidney Reflux (it has a fancy name but I can't spell it). She hated the VCUG, she had strangers pinning her down to the cold hard table while a big scary machine buzzed over her head. But as soon as it was done Daddy went in to save her.

The next day, Friday Sept. 18th we went back to meet her urologist and he had some news for us. Lilly was diagnosed with a Duplicate Collecting System on the right side of her body and kidney reflux which is caused by the duplication. This will require surgery to fix, but the surgery has a high success rate and we are hopeful that she will be "all done" (in sign language) after this one surgery.

Explanation: Normally you have 2 kidneys that have a tube (ureter) that drains into the bladder and that drains into the urethra which exits the body. We don't know for sure but the doctors suspect that Lilly has, on her right side, one kidney with some duplication in it and two ureters that exit it. The ureters meet and form into one that totally skips the bladder and enters the urethra instead. Her upper and lower poles of her kidney are swollen as well as the ureter. Normally when the bladder is full the pressure will close off the ureters so that urine does not back up into the kidneys but because Lilly's ureter doesn't go into the bladder she urine is constantly backing up into her kidney (reflux), thus causing all of the infections. The plan is for the doctor to take the ureter and "taper" it to make it smaller and then re-insert it into the bladder. We plan on scheduling the surgery sometime within the next two months. We don't want to risk kidney damage that may be associated with more infections and we also don't want her to remember it.