Well thank God that's over.
Last month when we reviewed Minifob's initial lab tests, you may recall that they showed a bacterial as well as a fungal infection in his digestive tract. So he was prescribed first an antibiotic, to be followed by an antifungal. But fungus is a fighter, and a standard course of antifungal drugs is 21 days, so add that to the 10 days of antibiotics and we've just now finished going through those two medications.
On the antibiotic, he was great. Moderate improvement in all areas. Hooray! Then, we started the antifungal, and he was immediately nasty. This was okay, because it's expected: part of fungus being a fighter is that it immediately and aggressively spores outward if something is killing the colony. So when treating any fungus (skin rash, vaginal yeast infection, whatever,) the symptoms will get a little worse before they get better. But he didn't get better. There were a few random tolerable moments, but for the most part he was hyperactive, emotionally unstable and generally defiant for basically the entirety of the last three weeks. Plus, his language went down the toilet. It was pulling teeth just to get him to use nouns, forget about the complete sentences and spontaneous speech he had been tossing about with ease before we started this treatment. This was, as you can imagine, incredibly demoralizing for me, as he basically lost everything we'd gained over the last three or four months.
But Friday night was the last dose of the antifungal, and today he's back! Happy, polite, and talking up a storm. I wouldn't say he's better than he was before we did the antifungal though, at least not yet, and that's a bit of a problem. I'm pretty sure they're going to tell me that the fact that he never "broke through" and got better while on the antifungal means that he still has a lingering fungal infection. But at the very least they can't tell me that until we go in for our next followup appointment, so I'm safe for another 2 and a half weeks... and in the meantime I have a good kid again, just in time for Flint and Pooka to meet him!
And in Minifobette's news, her initial appointment has been scheduled for September 29, so in the meantime we're left to continue experimenting on our own. One thing we've discovered is Undertoad may have been indirectly right about the calcium gummies--just a few days after her random burst of speech, most of the gains were lost again. So I was left floundering with this new data, until a few days ago when I accidentally forgot to add the
new calcium supplement (a pure powder) to my most recent batch of waffles, where I had started sneaking it in so we had one less vitamin to deal with at night. Minfob's just been getting the powder mixed in with the rest of his vitamins until we can use up this calcium-less batch, but I hadn't managed to get Minifobette started on anything yet--and suddenly her language is making huge gains again. Based on this, my best guess is it would seem she has a problem with calcium
itself. Online searching brings up a few anecdotes of autistic kids who were unable to process excess calcium, and buildup can cause a host of health problems, including things like kidney stones. So we're just going to keep her off of all calcium supplements for awhile, and hope that her little dairy-free bones don't start snapping like twigs if we happen to be wrong.
