Greetings :) We have been very busy here the last couple of weeks. We have been catching up on life and trying to get things into a normal routine again after all of the chaos at the end of July!

We started getting some more test results back for Rose Nacheca. Last week she went down to the endocrinologist at Children's and had an x-ray and some blood work done. We also went to an orthopedic doctor last week as well.

The orthopedic doctor looked at the x-rays from Children's and remarked that you could tell by her bones that she had been under a lot of stress, trauma or has an underlying medical condition. She has lines on her bones, at first I wondered if they were breaks, that are called growth arrest lines. They can tell by looking at the x-rays that she grows differently. She does not grow for a while and then she will grow and then she stops growing for a while and then she will grow again. Each of these cycles creates one of those lines. This is exactly how Michelle grows as well when she is not on her medication. She would grow and inch and then not grow at all for 10 months or so. It would be interesting to see if Michelle too has growh arrest lines on her x-rays. Other than that he said that her spine is straight, her legs are not clinically significantly different lengths so no lift is required for her shoes.

We got the results of her x-rays for the endo today. Her bone age is significantly behind. She is 36 months and her bone age is that of an average 22 month old. For a normal 36 month old she should have had 53 growth centers visable on her x-ray and she only 40. For those of you not familiar with the endocrine world this might not make much sense so just trust me, this is delayed. Her IGFBP-3 levels were the lower end of normal but her IGF-1 levels were not back yet. They should be back by Friday.

Michelle also had her bone age done last week and those results were good as well. They measured her after being on Growth Hormone for the last month and she had not grown AT ALL! This was very disappointing for me but at the same time not surprising. Her body makes more than enough GH but not enough IGF-1. The growth hormone is simply to level out her blood sugar. But it is frustrating that we are going through all the work and pain of the shots and it is not working at all. We are still battling with insurance to get her Increlex covered so that she can start back on that. Back to the bone age, the last time that she had her bone age done it was only 2 months behind her chronological age. So thankfully her bone age is now behind 12 months. This is good because at least while she has not been growing for the past 8 months, her bones have not matured either. This means that nothing has been lost during this stint off the medication.

Hopefully this is not too technical. I know some of you reading are going through the same things and know what all of this means. For those of you who don't sorry :(

Other than that Rose Nacheca got to experience her first taste of fair food! She loved it all, the chili cheese fries, corn dogs, corn on the cob and by far funnel cakes were her favorite! She is up 1 1/2 pounds now and doing great! Her vocabulary is growing so much everyday. She constantly makes us laugh with the things that she says :) She is even starting to make friends with the dogs!

Thanks for the prayers! Please pray that Michelle could get her Increlex quickly or it will be a very rocky start to the school year as her blood sugar adjusts to the medication!