Caden is home and napping in his own bed after a good day at the hospital. Caden had no ill affects of today’s procedure. We won’t know how effective this botox treatment is for at least a couple of days when it takes affect. It was a long day. We arrived on time, but did not send Caden back for the procedure area until about 11:00. There was a case before Caden in which the patient was slow to wake up and they wanted to make sure everything was good with that patient before moving to another case.
There was a little trouble as usual sticking Caden for his IV and they had to stick him in a separate spot to draw blood. All of this poking was done after giving him some sleepy gas through as mask to mildly sedate him. We found out after he woke up from the entire days events that the lab did not want to accept the type of vial used to collect one of the blood samples. They wanted to poke him again. We told the nurse that they would have to work this problem out with the lab because Caden was done getting stuck for today. Caden’s doctor walked up and echoed our response to the nurse about the blood test.
I have included an image to illustrate what this botox is actually doing. The two images below are show as if you were looking straight down Caden’s throat at the top of his esophagus. You can see that the opening to the esophagus was very small on 8/3/05 during the first botox procedure. The smaller image on the upper right was 
taken today and shows what affect the first botox treatment had on relaxing that muscle at the top of the esophagus. These images are arranged as if the front of Caden’s throat is at the top of the pictures. There will be no way to illustrate the effectiveness of today’s botox procedure since it will take a couple of days for it to take affect. We do expect for Caden to have another MBS (modified barium swallow) study done in the next week and a half.
Thank you so much for your warm responses to our prayer request. We give God the glory for all things in our life. Caden’s continued improvement is nothing short of a blessing to Caden and the rest of our family. I believe that God is smiling today at the number of people who are turning to him for answers for our family.