Do you like to collect something? Maybe you collect spoons, stamps, nativity sets, little bears, books, dust :) or something else. Collecting in general is fine... unless you are collecting what we have been the last couple weeks. We had to collect 5 stool samples and one urine sample. The stool samples were nasty and time consuming, but easy to get considering our son’s quick ability to digest! The urine sample was another story.
I am not a huge fan of collecting my own urine, it is sort of a challenge to hold the cup, a tiny bit might get on your fingers etc, but collecting urine from a baby... how do you do that anyway? We can’t ask our son to “pee in a cup please” so we have to attach a plastic sack to his body and wait for results. In theory, this would work pretty smoothly, but in practice it is a big mess.
The first sack was attached at the Intl Adoption Clinic. We were headed over to children’s hospital for labs so we were hoping that they could take it off and we wouldn’t have to worry about it. Arriving at children’s we learned that M certainly peed, but the sack fell off and the diaper was wet. The people at the hospital kindly attached a new type of sack with a lot more stick and sent us on our way.
When we returned home, M had a stinky diaper so we were ready for both stool and urine collection. Brandon and I were working together... the problem, tiny bits of poo mixed with the urine while the sack was removed (remember his poo was very loose at this time). We sent in the sample and hoped it would be fine.
A couple of days later we got the call that we needed to re-do the urine as there was bacteria in it. Shucks! We began trying to collect in ourselves and had no success. The plastic always came off and no urine was collected. Often the sack would be totally covered in poo also, yucky!
We had a Dr visit and the nurse put the sack on. Oh how I prayed it would work. Nope, that one fell off too. At least I knew it wasn’t my fault. We tried several more attempts and then I called the Dr office to ask if it was essential, and it was.
We had another visit to the clinic so I asked the nurse to try again. This time she glued, yes, she GLUED the sack to my son. Yes, the glue was attached to the most private areas of his little body. After she glued the sack on I gave him a bottle and proclaimed we were lot leaving the office without a sample.
We then went for a chest x-ray. The x-ray was awful by the way. M had to sit on a bike seat with a tube wrapped tightly around him and his hands in the air. I had to hold his head and hands. He was screaming, which apparently he needed to do to get a good photo. I felt like an awful mom as I could not soothe him since they needed him to cry.
After the x-ray we headed back to find our nurse for the urine check... and SUCCESS!!! I was praising God very vocally in that exam room as she peeled the glue off my son and rushed the sample to the lab.
We were done collecting... I felt like such a free woman with a free son. He could now go and we could throw! YAHOO!
We received great news this week that he has no parasites and the urine is also clean. We are still waiting to hear back on several tests, but so far, overall, he is doing very well. He is below the one percentile for height/weight, so he has nowhere to go but up... hopefully he will be on the charts soon!
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