Ellie's turn at the hospital

Max is having his cleft repaired next week, but we didn't think one visit to the local children's hospital was quite enough. Ellie has been having difficulties with recurrent urinary tract infections. She has a condition called vesico-ureteral reflux. This means that her ureters reflux urine back into her kidneys when she urinates. This means that if she gets a urinary tract infection she is at risk for getting a kidney infection. Chronic kidney infections can lead to kidney failure in the long term. She had been doing well for some time, but has had difficulty this summer/fall with getting frequent infections. Because of this her pediatrician recommended repeating some testing including a renal ultrasound, a VCUG, and a blood draw for kidney function. These were scheduled for Thursday. We've done everything but the blood draw before and Ellie did really well so I wasn't anticipating a problem. Ellie did great with the renal ultrasound, but for some reason when we walked into the fluoro suite to do her VCUG it all hit the fan. She was terrified. They have wonderful child life specialists to walk her through the procedure and we were able to get her through the first two steps, but when it came time to put the catheter in her bladder I could not keep her calm. She was fighting tooth and nail to get off of that table. Unfortunately, you can only do the test with a calm and relatively cooperative kid so we weren't able to finish the test. She was also too worked up to do the blood draw. I'll take her back later for the blood work, but I don't think I'm ever going to get her to do the VCUG. I've got a call into her pediatrician to see what she wants us to do. I'm thinking that we'll visit with the urologist again and see what other options we have. I hate what happend on two fronts. First, it is so awful to see your child so upset and scared and instead of just comforting her, to be the one trying to get her to do what she's so scared of. Second, I'm of course worried about what we do now. I hate the thought of trying to repeat that test. I dread that more than I dread Max's cleft surgery.