The Mighty Quinn, an update

A commenter on the next post asks if I'm going to provide any updates on Little Quinn's condition, so here it is:

First of all, we've fired his original pediatrician.

Most of this is due to a high degree of impersonal interaction The Wife experienced when she took Little Quinn to the medical offices where the Original Pediatrician (hereafter designated as "O.P.") practices. We're talking things like being left on hold for intervals exceeding ten minutes on routine phone calls merely to schedule appointments; calling the office with questions about Little Quinn's recent respiratory distress at 10:00 a.m. and finally getting a return call around 2:00 p.m. (you'd think that an infant having trouble breathing would somehow be placed around the top of the priority list); and a general refusal to listen to our concerns and treat the problems that we see on a daily basis. Little Quinn's feedings of late have been highly difficult, his chest has become highly congested, and worst of all, in the last month he has only gained three ounces.

So, in the course of talking to a woman who works at The Store (who has a grown son with many of the same problems Little Quinn has experienced, so it's not unlike having a human roadmap), we got the name of a pediatrician who has a lot of experience in dealing with "special needs" infants. After just the first visit with the New Pediatrician ("N.P."), we have a new medication to use in treating Little Quinn's reflux issues and a referral to a gastro-intestinal clinic to see if anything else is wrong with his digestion. Here's hoping that either nothing is wrong and that the new treatments will set things on the right path, or that if something is wrong, it will be fairly easily treated and again put to right. (The cynic in me leans to the latter, obviously.)

(If I might get slightly political here for a moment, our recent struggles have pretty much convinced me that any doctor who whines about malpractice suits and the like being "out of control" can, with all due respect, bite me. Doctors are not divinely-appointed people drawn from some rarefied echelon of super-intelligent or hyper-competent higher beings; they're people who have chosen a profession. Yes, they have to be intelligent to get there, and yes, they work hard; but I have seen nothing in the last six months that leads me to believe that the medical profession is any more exempt from Sturgeon's Law than any other. To paraphrase George Carlin, they're like anyone else: a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. Well, OK, maybe I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, but mediocrity exists everywhere, the medical field included. When a physician can weigh an infant who is well below the expected weight for an infant that age, and not say a single word about it, I am not encouraged. Yes, getting sued is unpleasant. But so is being on the receiving end of malpractice. End of rant.)

What else about Little Quinn? He is undergoing physical and occupational therapy now (under the auspices of state and county-run health programs), and he is starting to lift his head more when he's lying on his tummy, he'll roll over (nothing annoys an infant more than rolling from front to back and then having an excited parent go, "Whoa, that was cool! Do it again!" and then plunking him back in the original position so he'll do it again), and he's begun to experiment with "commando crawling". Oh, and he spits. A lot. I think he's part camel.

So that's about where Little Quinn is right now.