2009 August

Aug 09 2009

Since I wrote last Will has gone from eating ~30 oz a day to eating 15-20 oz per day. Needless to say it has been a long week. Wednesday was the worst. He would drink 2 oz of his 6 oz bottle then stop and cry, not taking any more. After every feeding I was in tears and spent lots of time on the phone with Jim and the pediatrician, because I was 800 miles from home finishing up a visit with my parents. There were several points during the day that I just wanted to go jump on a plane and take the boys home, hoping that would fix it. It was actually really good that I was there, because my mom and sister just took over watching Jack and would take Will from me once I stopped feeding him so I could cry and make phone calls.

All I could think was why is he going from eating 6 oz a feeding to eating 2 oz in 2 days? It wasn’t making sense to me that it was just reflux. I am pretty sure that reflux was partially involved, but usually it is a much slower for them to work down that much volume. Finally I decided to take his temperature, just to see. Well he had a low grade fever and had been having looser poops. So now we think he is sick, but what can we do, it is Wednesday evening and we don’t fly home until Friday afternoon. After being reassured by our fabulous pediatrician that he wasn’t in any immediate danger of becoming dehydrated with a couple of low volume days we made an appointment for late Friday just to check.

Thursday and Friday were better eating days that Wednesday, but not at all normal days. His mild fever was down, but he was still crying and fussing through the feedings. We were able to make a desperate enough case that GI at Children’s Hospital has agreed to see us next week and it is a doctor that we know. He performed Jack’s G-tube placement surgery. Hopefully he will have some insight next week.

We made it home Friday, without to many issues on the airplane (just a red Tylenol spit-up and some normal Will fussing), to get to the pediatrician (not our normal one, but one in her office). She checked him out and didn’t see anything really obvious, but said that there was a bug going around and he could have a sore throat that she just couldn’t see. At least we are home and will get to see our pediatrician on Monday and GI on Wednesday. Hopefully we can start to get this figured out.

Now Will too

Aug 03 2009

I should probably start at the beginning of the story to just give you some background. Jackson (who is now 4 ½ years old) started showing signs of feeding issues within 10 days of birth. We began by putting him on “hypoallergenic” formulas, while we ran some tests. During that time we also discovered during an upper GI procedure that he had “severe reflux.” This started months of switching formulas, increasing and changing medicines, many trips to Children’s Hospital for tests only to end up putting in a NG feeding tube when he was 4 ½ months old. We replaced the NG tube with a G-tube (surgically placed into is tummy) when he was 11 ½ months old.

The good part of his story is that he is now eating normally and probably better than a lot of kids his age and has been for 2 years. He participated in a 2 week intensive feeding program through Children’s Hospital when he is 2 ½ years old and was very successful. I will write more about his story later, but that is Jack in a nutshell.

Now on to Will… William was born March 18, 2009. Within 4 days he should the same signs of a milk protein intolerance as Jack, so we put him on the only formula that ended up working for Jack, Neocate (a prescription only formula that is very expensive, but works.) That helped the crying at night and got rid of the mucous in his poops. Two weeks later he started to cry during the feedings, showing reflux symptoms, so we put him on Prevacid. A week later we added Zantac at night to help him settle down. After an increase in his dose he has been humming along, gaining weight great until recently. He never has been easy to feed, but now he is crying during his feedings again and we are fearful that this is going to put us on another feeding aversion path.

It is such a helpless feeling to look at your baby crying while you are trying to feed them and not know how to help. It brings back all of the feelings I had with the months of fighting with Jack to get him to eat. Will may have not been easy to feed, but he would eat. I am just so fearful that he will decide that it hurts to much and stop eating just like his brother. All I want to do is help him.

A Mompreneur’s Chronicle Of Life With Her Boys

What a week

Now Will too

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