I am finally sitting down with a few minutes to update! Alex's ERCP went pretty well. He did better with the anesthesia then he has EVER done. So that by itself was nice. I really liked the Adult GI who performed the procedure. He met me 20 minutes before the surgery and took time going over everything they would do, what he would look for, what the possibiliti​es were, etc. It was pretty quick...abo​ut an hour total.

The results: Alex's anatomy is TINY! More so then they expected even for being such a peanut. They could not rule pancreas divisium in or out with 100% certainty. Although they were leaning towards him not having it. When they injected the dye only part of his gallbladder filled, meaning the sludge and possible stones are causing a blockage. They performed a sphincterot​omy where they enlarged the opening to the bile duct draining the gallbaldder and saw an immediate improvement in drainage. They considered all of his ducts "dirty". The recommendat​ion is to remove his gallbladder when we place the J tube. Right now we don't know whether any of this will help the pancreatiti​s. They also explained that if he got pancreatiti​s in the next 48 hours that would pretty much exclude pancreas divisium because they never found or touched the smaller duct that would be the "main" one in this condition.

A​lex has had a rough afternoon. They had to fill his bowels with quite a bit of air. For a normal person they would fart it out. Alex's body doesn't move anything in his GI tract including air. So it is sitting there giving him awful gas pain. We have had to give him several doses of a painkiller. So far he is not complaining of his pancreas hurting, but already his pancreatic enzyme numbers have quadrupled. So we are waiting to see what happens from here.

In typical Alex fashion we had to give the doctors and nurses a run for their money so he decided to have extremely low blood pressures following the procedure. We wound up just watching him and they did eventually come up on their own.

Anyway, we are settling in. We had to go to an intermediat​e room before our final stop because their were no beds in our normal unit with closer monitoring. So it was after 3 before we ever got to our final destination.​
I will update tomorrow after we see the doctors and our labs.

Ali