Shuey’s Life

Well we’re still dealing with it.  I’ve been off dairy since the 13th, we finished up the container of Nestle Good Start tonight, and I’m at my whits end.  I honestly don’t know what else to do…what could be causing it…when my daughter is going to stop screaming out in pain every 10 minutes.

I’m starting to think it’s possibly a form of colic. I think that because she doesn’t scream like this all day and night.  She’s pretty content during the daytime hours even if she has gas.  As soon as the darkness rolls around we’ve got a baby Jeckyl & Hyde going on.  I would think if it were something I’m eating or something she’s eating it would be a continuous problem no matter what hour of the day or night it is.

Ok so it’s been a week, and switching formulas hasn’t made a bit of a difference.  About 4 days ago I went off dairy completely as the doc suggested.  I’m going to stay off dairy for 7 days, and we’ll see if we have any improvement there.  We’re going to stick with the new formula until this can runs out (thankfully we only bought a small can) then we’re going to switch back to the Similac.

Honestly I think she was doing better with the Similac.  Since she’s been on the Nestle Good Start she’s been spitting up…a lot…and she wasn’t a big spitter upper before we switched.  Honestly I’d say until we started this formula I could count the number of times she’s spit up on one hand.

OK so maybe coming here everyday and recording what I ate isn’t going to happen.  I’ve been writing it down, but I haven’t been able to remember to login to the blog everyday to post it.  What I do know is I talked to another doctor who suggested that we do need to switch formulas to see if that’s causing the problem, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Nestle Good Start is supposed to be really gentle, so we’re going to switch to that.  The new doctor says if the formula is going to help we should see an improvement within a couple days.  If we don’t start to see an improvement then I’m going to go off dairy for at least 7 days.

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

I thought last night was going to be another long night around here because Elliana had another tummy ache.  She hadn’t pooped all day, but that’s normal for her now.  She normally goes once a day now, but it’s not unusual for her to go once every 2-3 days now.

Even after two doses of gas drops she screamed her little head off worse than we’ve ever heard her scream before.  It was so bad I broke down in tears quite a few times.  I was trying everything I knew to do to relieve her of the gas pains, and nothing was working.  I didn’t know what to do anymore, and it was hurting me to see her in so much pain.

She acted like she was constantly hungry.  I was afraid of overfeeding her, but I didn’t know what else to do but let her eat when she wanted to eat.  I knew she was in pain when she kept unlatching from the breast to scream.  I was so sore from feeding her so much that I broke down and gave her a bottle of formula even though I’m trying to ween her off the formula we’ve been supplementing with.

The formula actually seemed to do the trick.  As she was drinking the bottle she started passing massive amounts of gas and her tummy started making serious rumbling noises.  Within 10 minutes of finishing the bottle she blessed us with the biggest nastiest diaper we’ve seen yet. It’s the first diaper that has made Hubby gag, and there aren’t many things that do that to him.

As soon as she “got it out” she was fine though, and the child slept all night long!  Well she slept 5 1/2 hours which is all night to us since all this occurred late, and we finally got her to bed about 1am.  She woke up right before Hubby’s alarm went off at 6:30am, and honestly she’s slept a pretty good bit of today as well.  She had a good awake period this morning of about 2 hours, and she’s slept the rest of the day minus feedings.

I decided maybe I don’t need to work so quickly to cut the formula out of her diet.  Maybe I’ve been trying to cut it out too quickly, and maybe I should slow down by giving her 1 bottle a night right now instead of the two she was getting.  That way I’m not completely cutting her off the formula yet, but I’m giving her body time to adjust to getting less of it.  Maybe the switch off the formula isn’t the cause of the gas and pain she’s been having the last few days, but I’m going to do it anyway.  She didn’t start having major gas problems until we starting taking her off the formula.