Nate Update

Since it's the main thing on our minds these days, here's an update on Nate's situation. Nate has been diagnosed by our pediatrician with what seems to be a severe case of acid reflux. Since I posted on the 14th, we have seen the signs become a lot clearer and, unfortunately, a lot more pronounced. Nate isn't able to eat without pain, and just after starting to nurse or starting a bottle, he will arch away and just scream out in pain. But since he's still really hungry, he will try to eat again, which only makes the pain worse. We will go through this for maybe 20-30 minutes, with him barely nursing and only eating maybe 1/2 ounce and he will often doze off from all the exertion. But then he wakes up and is still hungry, still in pain and it all starts all over again. Feeding takes up to 2 hours and he sleeps in between, so all day and night he is either passed out asleep (restlessly) or awake and in pain. It's been terrible for all of us.

So we have been pretty aggressive with our doctor, making sure that we are doing everything we can for him. I began a dairy-free diet a couple of weeks ago and we switched his formula supplements to a hypoallergenic formula, in case this is a milk protein allergy. I took Nate to a children's occupational therapist and learned about positioning and feeding techniques that might help, and they also made us a couple of wedges that Nate needs to sleep and be changed on. Essentially, he shouldn't be horizontal...ever.

We started prescription Zantac a few weeks ago, with no improvement and we are in the process of weaning from that onto prescription Prevacid. I asked for a referral to a pediatric gastroenterologist--our pediatrician was still thinking this might just be "colic", but poor Nate proved that incorrect yesterday when he had a full force eating/crying/refluxing session in the doctor's office. While I hate to see him go through this over and over, that's all it took to get our doctor to call the Seattle Children's Hospital last night and send an urgent referral to their GI doctors for us.

So tomorow morning we are taking him in for blood tests to make sure there isn't something we are missing as well as an upper GI, where he will drink a few ounces of a barium drink and then have his upper GI system x-rayed. There won't be a magic reflux fix from doing this, but it will help make sure that there isn't something else going on, since this is a really severe case of reflux. At that point we will mke an appointment to see the GI doctors, go through those results and make sure we are treating this correctly.

I'm hopeful that the Prevacid will help--we had a relatively good day today, he actually had a couple of feedings without screaming, which wasn't happening even yesterday. And I am looking forward to working with a doctor who is more familiar with the condition and potential ways to alleviate the pain, as there isn't much we can do to fix this--rather, we are looking for ways to make it easier on Nate as he just grows out of it over the course of the next 6, 12, 18 months or so.

So everyday is a roller coaster, and you never know what will happen when he wakes up. I will keep the blog updated as we start with this testing and see where it takes us.

On the upside, Nate is still growing well despite the feeding issues and weighed in at 11 lb 4 oz yesterday! Today was the first day in the last month that he had enough awake, non-crying time to let him "play" a little and he got interested in the bouncy seat and actually hooked a ring with his pinky! He admired his handsomeness in the mirror in his baby gym for a while too. Here are a couple of recent pictures of the little guy...please keep your fingers crossed we can take some of this pain away for him soon.