Just When Things Were Going OK...

As we were getting ready for our busy Monday morning, I had to stop and change a diaper right before we walked out the door. Typical, I pretty much come to expect this each and every morning. As I was walking Kara downstairs to daycare I got a whiff of a really foul smell, only to find that she had another icky diaper. I gave the report of how her bottom is raw but she seemed to be OK and went on with my day. Brian called me mid morning to let me know that he talked to our daycare gal and she'd had a few more icky ones. I brushed it off as nothing and went about my busy day. Shortly after that something clicked and I remembered how quickly my poor baby gets dehydrated from these episodes and what happens when that's the case. I panicked and called daycare myself only to hear Kara crying in the background and was told that she just had another one. Her bottom is AWFUL. I assured her that I'd be there right away to get her, the sound of Kara crying and the thoughts of IV sticks, fluids, the whole works scared me to death. I quick gave out a report to a co-worker, nearly teary eyed and was running out of there to get my poor baby.

Kara was fine when I got there so that relieved me some and I realized how much I overreacted once I got home only to have her cautiously walking across the room, chit-chatting with herself along the way. She went down for a good nap and I was thinking maybe it was a fluke thing. She just woke up now and is having her bottle, but we did have another icky diaper. Damn.

I have a call in to her doctor to see if/when we should start her on medication. I know she can have some immodium and/or zofran but it's only to be used in extreme cases. I don't quite know what extreme is at this point, we've been through it all.

Wish us luck!

Getting By

In the days following we very slowly and very cautiously started trying more foods with Kara, scared out of our minds. We found she was able to tolerate wheat and barley just fine. She was also able to tolerate bananas, applesauce and pears; carrots, sweet potatoes and peas. I think we stuck with this diet for quite a while because it was simple enough and it was safe.

We ended up seeing her family doctor for one reason or another shortly after her gastro appointment. I asked what our next plan was. We decided that it was probably not necessary to see the gastro doctor at one year since we didn't gain anything by seeing him in the first place and that at one year we'd go see an allergist instead and go from there. We had our safe foods list and just worked on getting Kara to get other nutrition other than breast milk alone.

In the next few months Kara had quite a few episodes of dehydration. It seemed that as soon as she got sick, she was down for the count. We had a few times where she required IV fluids and getting an IV started on her was a horrible battle! She also had random episodes of vomiting and diarrhea but we were never able to pin point exactly what caused it or what she had to eat. We just hung in there waiting for her to hit that one year mark so we could go for additional testing to figure out what was wrong with our poor baby!