MRI

When Cora was about 6 months old, I enrolled her in a brain development study with Washington University. Every 3 months she goes through a battery of development tests, screening by a pediatric neurologist and gets an MRI. The deal with the MRI is that they don't want to use medication to sedate the children for the procedure. Thus they schedule them for when they are going to be sleeping for at least 1.5 hours (a.k.a. bedtime). Up until last week, we had never had a successful MRI. The biggest problem was just getting her to go to sleep in the MRI room. It became increasingly difficult to accomplish this task when I became pregnant as they would no longer let me in the MRI room. This most recent time, we decided that our best chance for getting the MRI was to keep her up all day and then have her fall asleep around bedtime on the way to the lab. Well, she didn't fall asleep on the way despite driving around for an hour. However, we decided to go ahead and see if she would fall asleep in the MRI room. Exhaustion finally won out at 9:30pm (1.5 hours after her normal bedtime) and they were able to get a complete scan!! This is pretty impressive considering that they put in earplugs, put her in a halo to line up her head and then run the very loud MRI machine for ~ 45 minutes. Below are some pictures that I have from the MRI.