Poor, Sweet, Sophie.....

I have written briefly about the problems I have had feeding Sophie over the past few months. Basically, she hasn't been that interested in baby food & she has choked a lot & vomited after eating any type of food, whether it be pureed or whole. I feel like a lot of people think I am exaggerating because she looks so healthy & lots of babies spit up, but this has been different. Way different.

 

Sadie spit up. Until she was over 1 year old. She had a dairy allergy that she didn't outgrow until she was 2. She also spit up all day every day. I was just used to a burp cloth & bib with her. But it was so natural - she just casually spit up & went along her way. Sometimes I wouldn't even realize she had done it unless I saw it.

 

 Not Sophie. For the first 6 months, she never spit up. I thought I was being rewarded for putting up with it the first time around! She has been vomiting for the past couple of months & in the last few weeks, it has escalated. It is definitely more than spit up. Her eyes get watery, she looks like she is choking & gagging & then she vomits every where. And it is a lot. It is definitely not natural. The good news is other than that, she has been acting like normal. She plays & smiles during the day, sleeps all night, is not running fever, it's weird. And she doesn't throw up during the day unless it is at feeding time. The majority of the time, if she is going to vomit, it happens with in a minute of her finishing her meal. Or sometimes during her meal. I am not going to lie, I have been frustrated. Number one, it's not normal. Most babies spit up earlier & they outgrow it around 6 months. Number 2, spit up is easy to clean. Vomit is not. I cannot tell you how many times I have washed the high chair cover & her car seat. And that's even after I have her covered in towels. Second of all, I had started getting worried about her health because she hadn't really kept down a good meal in the past 2 weeks. Third, my parents, Bryan's parents & his grandmother have all babysat her in the past few weeks & she was really sick with all of them & they even said something was wrong. After several calls to the doctor's office over the past couple of months, I finally scheduled an appointment & took her in yesterday:

 

 

We met with her regular pediatrician, Dr. Terry. She is familiar with Sadie's dairy allergy & she is aware of the problems we had when I was trying to nurse Sophie early on. Her biggest concern was Sophie's weight loss. Apparently, she had lost over 1/2 pound from her 9 month check up, which was a couple of weeks ago. I know that doesn't sound like much, but at this age, it is. She recommended I see a Pediatric GI Specialist, but she warned that it might take a while to get in. Fast forward to 1 hour later when she called me & said that after she talked to the specialist, he was concerned & wanted to do some testing immediately. Talk about scary! Bryan was out of town & Sadie was at school, so I was able to rush her there to have the images done while Bryan's parents picked up Sadie from school.

 

 

Their main concern was that there could be something blocking the esophagus so food isn't traveling as it should. They were worried about a foreign object she could have swallowed. I was so nervous - could Sophie have possible swallowed something months ago that was triggering her sickness? Luckily, her Upper GI looked clean & normal. There were no foreign objects, cysts or tumors blocking the way. Poor girl had to be strapped down & they gave her barium to swallow from a bottle while they moved her all around so they could get pictures of her swallowing inside:

 

 

It probably took about 15 minutes & I hated every minute of it, but at least they were able to give her a clear check up. By the time I got home, her pediatrician & the GI Specialist had already called & we scheduled an appointment for us to meet him this morning. Fortunately, Bryan flew home last night so I didn't have to go by myself this time.

 

Basically, we learned that most babies who spit up, peak between 2-4 months & usually stop or slow down around 6 months. Where Sophie never even started getting sick until she turned 6 months. The obvious connection is that is around the time I started feeding her food. So, we are going to start back from the beginning & treat her like a 6 month old baby. We are going back to formula only for a few days to see if it cleans up her system & to see if she can keep it down without getting sick. And then we are going to introduce new foods again - fruits & vegetables only. No meat & absolutely nothing with dairy. If you check labels, milk is in a lot of things, so this is going to be really hard. His first instinct, is that this has something to do with the dairy allergy since Sadie had problems too, but obviously Sophie's is a lot worse. He is also concerned that she could have Eosinophilic Esophagitis, which is triggered by a milk allergy. He would like to do an endoscopy so he can pull tissue samples to confirm this, but that would require putting her under with anesthesia, which we have never done before. Unfortunately, while we were at the doctor yesterday, she was diagnosed with a double ear infection on top of all this other stuff, so he considers her too fragile to do the endoscopy until she is finished with her antibiotics & feeling better. So, our goal is to go formula only, no food until we introduce new, "clean" food, with the hopes of settling her stomach until we can perform the endoscopy in another 2 weeks or so. I really have a strong feeling that all of her problems are connected to her dairy allergy since I had problems nursing both of my girls & both of them had the same allergy. If hers is as severe as they think, we may have to adjust the way we eat in this house because I am a dairy girl all the way :(