Developments

Well, it's been an eventful week. As I look around my house, it looks like absolutely nothing got done and a particularly destructive tornado hit most of the rooms. The laundry has piled up again. This is mostly due to the fact that I spend any laundry time trying to keep up with Ethan's spit up...

Which brings me to the newest development: Mr. E is no longer just spitting up, he's moved on to bigger and better (?) things...projectile vomitting.

The first time it happened, I believe it was after he had been crying pretty hard while I was trying to get ready after my shower. He was fed, changed and otherwise clean and healthy, but just angry that I had to put him down for a few minutes. He cried and cried and then projectile vomitted all over his (just bathed, I believe) self. Not just a little spit up this time, but very mobile puking. Oh what fun.

Over the next 3-4 days, he continued to have at least one or two episodes of projectile vomitting in addition to his already copious spit-up. Since he is already on Zantac for acid reflux and the vomitting was getting worse, I made yet another trip in to the pediatrician, with both kids in tow.

Of course our usual pedi. wasn't in (we almost never hit a day when she's in despite the fact that she's in the office 4 days a week), so we saw another doctor. He examined Mr. E and talked with me (all while Emily never stopped talking and Ethan was crying). The doctor finally said that he thought we should do an upper GI for Ethan and that, if he hadn't eaten in two hours, we could probably do it right away. Well, as luck would have it, it had just been two hours since I last fed Mr. E and the hospital could fit us in, so off we went.

After walking nearly a mile through the hospital while carrying a 10 lb. baby in a 10 lb. or so carrier, and trying to keep Emily moving with me, we finally made it to radiology....where no one could find the order that was supposed to be faxed to them. We waited (with a hungry baby who wasn't allowed to eat) and a hungry nearly 5 year old who had no food to eat (it was lunch time) and me, who was hungry as well and trying to keep both kids from totally losing it.

The doctor's orders were finally found (about an hour later) and we proceded back to the radiology room where the techs immediately informed me that Emily could not be in the room with us. This is where the hungry Miss Em and the angry Mr. E both lost it. I had to literally choose which kid to stay with, and since both were in tears and I wanted to know what the test would show, I needed to stay with Ethan. So, I did my best to reassure Emily that the nurse would take good care of her and that I would not leave her and she left, with a quivering chin and tears in her eyes. Mr. E kept crying.

In short, the more serious condition that the Doctor wanted to rule out was indeed, ruled out and no structural abnormalities were found after the barium swallow (yuck!). However the doctor seems to think that significant acid reflux (GERD) is the cause of Mr. E's troubles. His solutions, however, leave me feeling rather uncomfortable.

Basically the options were to A.) thicken his milk with rice cereal, which is pretty darn near impossible to do unless I pump every feeding, and which I have since read, is no longer an accepted treatment for reflux as it only seems to reduce spit-up but not the acid, and may actual make it more likely that Mr. E would aspirate his spit-up, or B.) give him a medicine called Reglan, which helps empty the stomach faster, leaving less to spit up, but again, not really fixing the underlying problem of too much acid. Along with not really fixing the problem, Reglan has some pretty serious potential side effects, in particular neurological ones such as uncontrollable twitching, which I am highly uncomfortable with, since anyone who has ever spent much time around an infant can tell you, they already twitch a lot, so I'm not sure how I would distinguish a problem in time.

So, all in all, I think I'm not going to use the Reglan and will probably try to talk with my regular doctor and ask about something a lot less controversial to try first, like Prevacid or Prilosec...or even formula.

This parenting thing is hard. It's hard to try to make the right decisions when you just want your child to not be in pain. I can only begin to imagine the decisions that parents of very ill children face every day.

It reminds me that I am very, very blessed...and yes, the house is still a mess and may stay that way for the forseeable future, but our kids are healthy and generally happy and that's what really matters in the end.