Needing Hope For Severe Reflux
I have posted about our situation before in other subs but unfortunately it just keeps getting worse and I am losing hope quick 😔
Our now almost 9 week old has dealt with horribly painful reflux since the moment he was born. We tried Pepcid at 2 weeks and that didn’t work. I cut out all dairy / soy / egg from my diet and he got officially diagnosed by the GI specialist with CMSPI at 6 weeks (we thought maybe Pepcid was helping & it wasn’t allergies causing the reflux so trialed a dairy formula to see if it would help with reflux & it made things sooooooo much worse). He stopped gaining weight and dropped to under the 4th percentile so we are fortifying our bottles with pepticate (we tried alimentum and he wouldn’t drink it). Our GI also took us off Pepcid and gave us generic nexium which is. Not. Helping. We’ve been on it for 7 days now. We are dealing with hours of screaming everyday, the gulping, the coughing, the hiccups, constant wakeups all day and night, refuses to sleep on his back, can barely drink more than 1.5 oz at a time, and by morning he is horribly congested from all the mucus buildup from the reflux. And usually at least once a night I wake to him gagging and choking on his reflux. Yesterday he spit up what seemed like an entire feed, it soaked the burp rag. The other night from 2am-7am he woke up every 30 minutes.
My husband and I are just beyond neurological overdrive from this. We also have a 23 month old who requires our care and attention. Thankfully we have amazing family help which is a blessing that will never be lost on us. But I obviously can’t bond with my baby at all 😭 not to mention the sleep deprivation has pretty much destroyed any rational thoughts I can muster about our situation (I am going up on my sertraline to help cope).
Our first barely ever took a bottle in the 13 months of nursing and it was truly the greatest experience for both of us. I had hyperemesis this second pregnancy and just kept telling myself to stay strong until it was over and I could breastfeed again because I truly loved that experience. And now I can’t even do that 😔 he screammmssss at the breast and doesn’t have enough strength to pull any hindmilk so all he gets is foremilk which makes this whole horrible cycle even worse (our speech therapist thinks that his feeding aversion has caused so much tension he basically hasn’t been able to develop proper oral function). So anyway, I am pumping full time. And I get really bad d-mer with pumping and basically have to take deep breaths and just survive the 20 minutes 7 times a day… I almost wish nursing wasn’t a good experience with my first so that I wouldn’t be so devastated about what I’m missing out on. Now I do love formula and am so grateful for it. It’s not a nutrition thing for me at all formula is amazing and anything saying it isn’t is just noise. It’s more about the personal experience and bonding and purpose that breastfeeding gave me and our first.
I probably sound like a crazy person screaming into the void but this has truly been the hardest experience for me physically, emotionally, spiritually, all of it 😩 I’m so sorry for the long post but if you made it through this ridiculousness and have any words for me I’d be so grateful. Has anyone had an experience like ours? Can you offer me hope? Was anyone able to eventually breastfeed their baby with oral dysfunction? Is there anything else we can try?
Thank you so much for even reading & just allowing a space to vent