I don't remember if I posted last week about our bout with the stomach flu. Despite all our precautions of keeping Olivia away from little kids and out of crowded public places, I ended up getting a stomach bug and passing it on to the little one. It was totally disheartening, by the time I realized that I was sick it was too late and she ended up having diarrhea for four days. Amazingly enough she still managed to put on almost a pound anyway so she got a gold star. The downside was that all that bathroom action left her little rear end raw and created a small tear where there were minute amounts of blood being passed. Any time you start seeing blood in your baby's diaper, you panic. We were advised to hold off her aspirin and give it a weeks time to heal. No problem, we made good progress and as of last night resumed the aspirin since things were much improved.
Unfortunately, things were not really healed and around 3:30 this morning I was in the middle of a routine diaper change to find a lot of blood there. Livvy was sleeping through the whole event, but I went and woke up Brian to have him take a look and decide course of action. We decided there was no point to rush over to the hospital in the middle of the night if she was still eating well, pulse ox looking good, and not running a temp. The story changed though when I changed her around 6 and found only blood in that latest diaper. I went off paging the cardiology staff at Hope and getting the ball rolling. They advised that we hold the aspirin indefinitely and call our pediatrician's office to get in for a visit immediately so they could confirm the tear or decide if we needed to do some invasive investigation as to the source of the bleeding.
Thankfully the pediatrician got us in right away, tear was not confirmed but they did a blood count and Olivia is looking excellent. The bottom line - no pun intended is that he feels that her formula that we are mixing with my breast milk is aggravating her stomach lining and causing the bleeding; so our current fix for the situation is to switch Missy to soy formula. I tend to disagree because she had been on that formula mixed with breastmilk since we came home and we went weeks without any issues, but I am willing to try whatever so that I don't see any more blood like we did this morning. Thankfully Olivia is completely unaware of the scare she gave us. She's still smiling, all vitals look great and she's eating like a horse!
Been lurking for awhile. We talked briefly before you had Olivia on FB (Ilbawi performed my son's surgery in November).
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad to hear that Olivia is doing so well.
To be honest, when you mentioned the bleeding, a dairy allergy was my first thought. My oldest son had one and it didn't show up until he was about 2-3 months old. I had to go off of dairy completely and he could only have soy formula. It's a tough diet, but one that helps take the baby weight off in a hurry. Also, it takes about 2 weeks to get dairy out of each of your systems, so you might need to try life without dairy for awhile before seeing a full resolution.
Kellymom.com has a great article on dairy allergies and Whole Foods used to have a list of ingredients to avoid when on a dairy free diet - it's long and many foods have "hidden" dairy (like some hot dogs, most bread, and McDonalds french fries...I know, such a bummer).
Good luck and, again, I'm so happy that Olivia is doing so well!