Our Third Son Joins Us.....The Journey Begins

On October 27, 2005 our family was blessed by the birth of our third son. His birth was a bit complicated as he was delivered frank breach. The doctor didn’t realize he was breach until after my water had broken and I was dilated to 9 ½ cm. However, despite the complicated birth, he was a beautiful healthy baby boy, checking into the world at 6 pounds 14 ounces.

The first 3 weeks after he was born, things were wonderful. He was such a sweet baby who loved to be held. He was peaceful and slept well. He was exclusively breastfed and was gaining weight well. About 3 weeks in some symptoms started to develop.

• He started to spitup profusely with each feeding.
• He developed a diaper rash that wouldn’t clear up, no matter what remedy was tried on it.
• His stools became very loose and full of mucous, he would have 5-6 stools per day.
• He would wheeze after nursing.
• He had an eczema rash on his skin (particularly behind his ears and on his scalp).

• He had red eyes and a plugged nose.
• He would only nap for 15 minutes at a time, and then would awake screaming.
• He had to be held constantly and would scream most of the time he was being held.

We saw the pediatrician several times between weeks 3-6. At first they started him on Zantac to help control the reflux. At 4 weeks old, I removed tomatoes from my diet, things improved slightly. At 5 weeks old he had an incident with projectile vomiting (after I ate ice cream the night before). Finally at about 6 weeks old the pediatrician tested for blood in the stool, microscopic amounts of blood were found. The pediatrician suggested that it might be a milk allergy. She suggested that all obvious forms of dairy be removed from my diet. This really overwhelmed me as I couldn’t imagine my diet without dairy as it was so embedded in. However, I did it and found that it wasn’t too bad, at this point I definitely wanted to help my son (I was seriously considering dairy-free formula at this point).

I replaced cow’s milk with soy milk, symptoms worsened. At this point the pediatrician contacted a Pediatric Gastroenterologist. He suggested that our third son be placed on an amino acid based formula called Neocate. He said that we would have a "new" baby after 5 days. So we started on Neocate while I maintained my milk supply by pumping. This was very exhausting to be pumping 6-8 times a day & bottle feeding 6-8 times a day. Things did not improve, the screaming worsened. During this time I decided to remove ALL dairy, soy, chocolate & tomatoes from my diet. At the end of 5 days it was obvious that Neocate was not the answer and we went back to breastfeeding with me on a strict diet. Things were much improved. He started napping better, the diaper rash pretty much cleared up. The stools improved a little, and some of the screaming stopped. We were finding a few answers....but it was just the beginning.