Shuey’s Life

I’m learning how hard it is, and how horrible it makes you feel when your child is in pain and you can’t take that pain away.  I talked to the doctor today because we’re still dealing with a ton of painful gas around here.  She’s not constipated, but she’s seriously gassy.  The gas drops help for about 10 minutes at a time, and if we were to give them to her every single time she screamed with a gas pain she’d be going well over the maximum of 12 doses a day.

A friend of ours had suggested that it may be the formula we’re using.  We’re still using the Similac we fed her in the hospital and for the first month.  Since she is a preemie we had to give her premixed formula until she reached newborn statues (aka her due date) because it’s sterile whereas powder formula isn’t.  We didn’t have problems with gas until the last 2 weeks or so, so the doctor doesn’t seem to think the formula is the problem.  The fact that the formula is actually helping her have a bowel movement that relieves her pain is another reason she agrees that it’s probably not the formula at fault, so we’ve stopped trying to ween her off it, and we’re still giving her 2 formula bottles in a 24 hour period.

So what’s next?  That leaves us to believe either I’ve started eating something recently that’s upsetting her stomach, or she’s developed an allergy to something I’ve been eating all along.  Of course the two main culprits are normally nuts and dairy.   I had a big container of peanuts I snacked on for the first two weeks I was home, and those didn’t bother her then.  I haven’t eaten nuts since, so that’s not the issue.  The next thing to do is to either eliminate all dairy from my diet for a couple weeks which is seriously hard to do, or I can keep a food diary to see if I notice anything else that seems to be bothering her.  After all it isn’t everyday that she has painful gas like this, but she had definitely had it the last 3 days.  Now I just need to try to recall what I’ve eaten all three days.

I do know it seemed to start within hours of me eating a mushroom and swiss thickburger.  Then I realized the last time we had really bad gas issues a couple weeks ago I had just eaten a ton of raw mushrooms in a salad.  I’ve cut mushrooms out of my diet, but that hasn’t stopped the gas.  Of course it’s also only been 2 days.

I’m going to start a food diary right now with a list of everything I’ve eaten today.  Hopefully I can remember to keep up with it everyday, and maybe we can figure out what the culprit it.  I’m crossing my fingers and hoping it’s not diary because if it is I’ll have to stop breastfeeding.  It’s virtually impossible for me to cut every single diary item out of my diet.  Even if I were to give up all the diary items I love I’d still have to meticulously read labels because diary is in so much stuff it’s almost impossible not to eat it.

Anywho, here’s the list of what I had today.

Breakfast:

Two cream cheese danish toaster strudels

Lunch:

Chicken Parmesean

Dinner:

Flounder with fried okra and squash