Like Brother, Like Sister

When our toddler was 4 and 5 weeks old, he turned fussy. He went from being a delightful mellow happy kid to a screamer. All. The. Time. Then, the day he turned 6 weeks old, I changed his diaper in the evening and it was not right. Instead of the normal color and consistency that we had come to understand as being normal for a breastfed kid, it was horrible colors - including bright red blood. As you can imagine, this terrified us as new parents. But it was late Sunday night so we just put another diaper on, hunkered down for the night, and waited until the morning to call the doctor. At that point of his life he was sleeping from about midnight to 5am in a solid chunk but I remember spending a lot of that night googling the possible options. None seemed good. We spent a week or so trying things like block feeding to ensure the right percentages of the right kinds of milk and I gave up overt dairy like ice cream and cheese. Nothing got better, in fact it got worse. The next couple week I gave up all dairy and soy. It got worse. He got diagnosed with MSPI, or Milk Soy Protein Intolerance. I was mentally falling apart. So we decided to put him on Alimentum as a test. During that 10 day span, I went on the total elimination diet and pumped around the clock in hopes of getting my body clean enough to feed him. Everyone was miserable. Hubby was supportive of my attempts but he was back at work by that point so I was pretty much on my own a lot of the days. It sucked. After 10 days I went back to nursing. In 36 hours, he was bleeding again. He refused to nurse. I gave him a bottle and he literally gave a sigh of relief and never looked back. Eventually, about a month later, the Alimentum stopped working - he bled again - and we moved to Elecare. Luckily he was a mellow kid as long as there was something going in his mouth and he adapted to both formulas easily. Especially because his brain seemed to understand that it was helping him. After 10 months we added soy into his diet and after a year we introduced yogurt and then dairy. By 13 months he was deemed healed, at 14 months he graduated from the GI and became a normal kid in the GI sense. However, we continue to deal with ramifications of that time. He wound up with some serious food aversions and wouldn't put food in his mouth. That was hard, but he got the calories he needed from formula. However eating does way more than just nourish you - it teaches your mouth to work in different ways that leads to speech. Luckily that is getting better now, but it has been hard.

Anyway. Our newborn has been showing symptoms of MSPI for a lot of her life. However, for every symptom I thought I saw, I also found something to argue that she didn't have it. Nursing was easy from the beginning and she gained weight like a champ. But her diapers have always been a little weird and she has hated filling them from day one. We had never had a 'normal' kid before though, so we didn't know what things from Derek's life to attribute to MSPI and what was not. Last weekend I had ice cream and pizza. I hadn't been avoiding dairy but I hadn't really had a lot of it either. But the morning after the pizza she woke up covered in a rash from head to torso. It could have been baby acne, but the sudden appearance was fishy. Her fussiness picked up, too. On Easter Saturday we celebrated with family. In retrospect I did have more dairy than usual. There were lots of adults here and so she was passed around all day and I didn't realize until later how fussy she had been all day. She had a bloody diaper at her bedtime diaper. So, instead of nursing her, we gave her a bottle. (We happen to have 7 cans of Elecare in the house that we thought were expired and when we went to throw them out last week during a cleaning frenzy we realized they are good til October!)

At Derek's GI graduation appointment, we asked about the chances of any future kids having this. Our GI actually had 2 kids of her own with it. The regular pediatrician said she wouldn't have any more of a chance than any other kid but it does seem like the people I know who deal with it see it in multiple kids. We talked to both of them before this baby was born and said our family decision was that if this kid bled, we were not messing around with diet and Alimentum, we were going right to Elecare. We didn't want to watch another kid suffer for more than a month and deal with the ramifications. So tomorrow I have lots of doctors to talk to and appointments to make.

I'm sad that she bled earlier and is missing out on a month or more of antibodies. I'm sad that even though we suspected it, I was blind-sighted and didn't know our 8pm nursing session was my last one ever. I'm sad that I still hurt from my reconstruction and now am dealing with the physical and mental issues that come with weaning at a time where she was eating around the clock. I'm sad we will never have an average regular baby. I'm worried that she won't be as lucky as Derek in the growing out of it way. I feel guilty for wishing, just days ago, that someone else could feed her once in awhile so I could get some sleep. I'm sad that she hasn't taken to me giving her a bottle yet because she wants something else. I'm sad that I thought BF was going so well, and I was poisoning her all along.

I'm glad that she is already feeling better. I'm glad that we are seeing her rash disappear by the hour, and hoping that her insides are healing as quickly. Derek had the rash for more than a month and it took more than a month for it to go away after we switched. So we do have a little physical sign that she's healing quicker. I'm hoping the fact that she gained so much weight while still BF means that she was bringing in a decent amount of calories even with the lack of absorption. I'm reminding myself that Derek and I still have a great bond regardless of how he was fed.

We're re-learning how to do this. We remembered after a couple failed bottles that in our variety pack there are different speed bottle nipples - and she was much more successful when we realized that and made sure she had a slow one! We are trying to figure out how many ounces a 1 month old eats, because it's very different than a 2.5 month old like last time. And I'm still recuperating from my delivery - that was better by the time we did this last time. She was not digging the formula at all last night, but now she's taking it no problem (as long as it's not from me.) My mom graciously changed her plane ticket to help with the middle of the night stuff for a couple days while we figure this out. Mike's FMLA leave ended last week because he went back to work - and he can't come and go and still have it be FMLA. Plus we'll need his sick days for dr's appointments since I'm out of days. My mom and Mike did all of the feedings last night and I got 5 hours of sleep for the first time since who knows when, between the heartburn of late pregnancy and the four weeks of nursing around the clock.

It's hard. It's frustrating. It's the latest in the seemingly endless challenges that came from us saying, "Hey, let's have some kids!" But as Mike tried to point out to a very irrational me late last night, the IVF rounds sucked, but they eventually worked. Derek's MSPI sucked, but he healed. His lingering issues suck, but they're getting better. The injury from his delivery sucked, but I got mostly better. The injury from this delivery really sucked, but with time it will hopefully be better. And hopefully 12 months from now we'll have a kid who can eat her first birthday cake.