Hard choices

Being a parent means the well being of your child is mostly in your hands. Medical choices are yours to make and those choices directly affect the health of your child.

Olivia was diagnosed with VUR (vesicoureteral reflux; a condition where her urine back flows into her kidneys causing repeated kidney infections) when she was 6 weeks old.

Most babies grow out of it and those who don't get a non invasive surgery to correct it. So the problem either fixes itself or is easily fixed. Sounds great, but the waiting time until it fixes itself or can be fixed is where the choices and the issues can occur.

Anytime you get a kidney infection scar tissue forms; too much scar tissue leads to kidney failure.

So, preventing kidney infections is really important. In Olivia's case the way to prevent it, is with prophylactic antibiotics (a low dose of antibiotics given everyday to prevent infection). It's simple really, we give her antibiotics and she doesn't get infections and her kidneys stay healthy. Sounds simple enough.

The only problem is being on antibiotics causes other issues. Specifically to the gut flora. Our stomach is filled with bacteria, bacteria we need, it's the good kind of bacteria, but antibiotics do not differentiate. It's like chemo in that sense, it kills the cancer cells but also healthy cells too.

Killing off this good bacteria can cause a lot of issues especially with nutrient absorption, and even make you more susceptible to allergies. It can also cause eczema.

Which Olivia has. So what do we do about the eczema? What about the affects of those things?

So many options, so many unknown outcomes. Parenting can be really hard.