ER, CT, MRI...OK

So here we are the week after the diving finals and Gabe decided to learn a new dive, the back flip. You are supposed to do a back dive and right before you start to drop, you do a flip and then dive in. Easy, right? After working on it for two practices, he was doing great, however, the last five minutes of practice one day, he flipped too soon and hit his head on the diving board.

We were supposed to leave for California right after I picked him up, but instead I picked him up and off to the ER we went. He was bleeding a lot as head wounds tend to do, but we got that under control. I probably wouldn’t have taken him to the ER but he started throwing up as we were leaving and I was afraid of a concussion or worse.

To make a four hour experience in the emergency room short, he had a CT scan which was suspicious for a small bleed so an MRI of his brain was ordered. That turned out to be negative as it was a small vein instead of a bleed. The cut was small enough to be glued shut, so away we went.

Something funny though, the radiologist who read his CT and MRI scans stated to the ER doc that Gabe had the most interesting tangle of veins around his brain and such that he has ever seen…nothing wrong with it, just different. We love to tease him now about his “weird brain,” but he says it is perfect…and he is right.

Stay tuned for the next ER visit …three days later.



Update: I spoke with Gabe's pediatrician today who had just recieved his MRI results from the hospital. This is what the radiologist said:

Impression:
1. Negative acute MRI of the brain.
2.Low density seen in bilateral hemispheric white matter probably reflects dilated perivascular spaces as evidenced by MRI. However, this is of no clinical significance.

She basically said that the radiologist probably didn't know what he was looking at and probably hadn't really seen very many 8-year-old's brains. No worries.