The Kidney Story

This has been a big week for Baby Davis. He has had two trips to the doctor this week. While I was pregnant we discovered during an ultrasound that Davis had a dilated kidney tube on the right side. At the time we were assured that this is relatively common in boys and usually goes away before birth. About a month ago we did a follow up ultrasound on Davis. We traveled all the way down to Texas Childrens to do this. Davis slept through most of the journey. We took him into the ultrasound room and the tech came in and did an ultrasound just they had done on my for months. In my head it was going to be much more traumatic than it was. Davis didn't even cry! The tech didn't say or reveal much...which was really annoying. That night Dr. Pope called to informed us that Davis has a duplicated collecting system. He explained this briefly but I was so upset that I couldn't even process what he was saying. I called Steve who was on his way home from work and he called Dr. Pope back to get the scoop. We spent the night researching online.

What this amounts to is this: When Davis' right kidney was forming it ultimately sort of divided into two sections. These two sections each have a ureter that drains urine into the bladder. The problem with this is that sometimes the bladder with 'reflux' back up into the kidney causing it to become dilated or 'puffy'. This dilation will set Davis up for kidney infections or UTI's.

Dr. Pope said we needed to see a pediatric urologist. Who even knew there was such a job! We scheduled another appointment down at Texas Childrens with Dr. Janzen. We made another trek downtown to meet with her. She was VERY nice and soft spoken. She calmly explained what was going on and showed up the ultrasound of his kidney. Basically from the ultrasound we could tell that there was fluid in his kidney that was not filtering down into the bladder. She ordered a VCUG test.