Abdominal Migraines

Each year that has passed we have seen more symptoms pop up in Hudson.  It seems 2012 is not going to be an exception.

For a long time now Hudson has dealt with mysterious abdominal pain, episodes that are very intense and last anywhere from an hour to all day.  They come on very suddenly, the only warning sign we have that one is coming is that Hudson gets very restless and agitated.  He becomes extremely pale, retches violently from nausea, is intolerant to his feeds or fluids, is lethargic, has cold sweats, cries, and alternates between curling up into a ball and moving around trying to get comfortable.  Afterwards he is extremely tired, but eventually he returns completely to normal.  He has been worked up thoroughly for gallbladder and other intestinal issues, but everything always seems to come back within normal limits.  When he was diagnosed with Cdiff last year we thought maybe that was the cause of the pain, but he has had 3 attacks since clearing the infection.

During a routine pulmonology appointment on Monday, he was having a very bad attack, this particular one lasted about 6 hours.  His doctor was very worried with how bad he looked and sent us over to the hospital for a KUB and other X-rays to see if there was a blockage in his intestines.  The results were clear.

The next day we had a routine appointment with his mito dr.  I don't know what it was that made her think of it, because we have been trying to figure these episodes out for over a year, but after describing his latest attack from the day before, and her reading of the notes, she said she thinks he's having abdominal migraines.  These are a variant form of traditional migraines, except instead of causing intense pain in your head, they cause intense abdominal pain.  There is not really much treatment for these.  If we see him starting to have one, we're supposed to give him ibuprofen, and unless they start becoming much more frequent she would like to stay away from the more heavy duty meds.  When I got home I read about abdominal migraines, and Hudson fits literally every symptom, so it feels promising to finally have a diagnosis for what he is suffering from.  Like most symptoms of mito, there are no clear cut treatments or ways to fix it, but at least we know what we are dealing with and can move forward with knowledge.