Dr. Bawle - Genetics

Today was our appointment with Dr. Bawle at Children's Hospital in Detroit. We had to wait almost 3 months to get an appointment with her. I spent one hour with a genetics counselor going over Kaiden's medical history. I thought that would take one minute since I had mailed in a 6 page questionnaire and they had all of his reports from the other specialists ahead of time as well as the fact that we don't have much of a medical history and zero family medical/birth/pregnancy history. But she wanted to go over all the specialists reports.

After that, then Dr. Bawle came in to do a complete physical on him. The first few things she mentioned were a surprise to me. She said she didn't think he had a left testicle. We've only had two appointments with our pediatrician since we've been home and although she's had numerous things to discuss with us, I thought she would have noticed that. Dr. Bawle also felt something on his left lower abdominal area. She didn't think it was a tumor but she didn't think it was just stool either because it was hard and would not roll as it should have. Kaiden had just had a bowel movement prior to coming into the examining room so this sort of made sense. She gave me a script to have an ultrasound done and suggested that I call our pediatrician to discuss it further.

Based on the fact that Kaiden is making improvements instead of progressing backwards, Dr. Bawle did not order the Reyes test. She did want to order the CGH test. The genetics counselor discussed with me the option of having the blood drawn today and ordering the test today or calling my insurance company first to find out if it is going to be a covered test (some insurances do not cover genetic testing) and coming back to have the blood drawn if we decide to proceed with it. Although it meant I would have to hold Kaiden while his blood was being drawn (that is normally Pete's responsibility), I choose to just have it done right then while I was already there. I don't particularly care for going to Children's Hospital. I also wanted to get it going as soon as we could since it seemed like we had been waiting forever to get here! It's the only option we have for finding out some of his medical history so I knew we would get it done whether it was a covered test or not. As it turns out, as long as the phsycian provides medical reasoning for the test, our insurance will cover it.