A long two months...

Waiting for an X-Ray at PCH East Valley Urgent Care

So, the months of October and November were very long! Monkey started showing signs of GERD and a Milk/Soy Allergy, he was projectile vomiting, and had blood in his vomit occasionally, so he was put on Allimentum formula and Zantac and refered to a GI. The GI added Prilosec in addition to the Zantac to control the GERD and switched him to an elemental formula. Elemental formula has all the proteins broken down so, essentially, there is no chance of an allergic reaction to it. The elemental formula seemed to help some, the blood in the vomit stopped, but he was still projectile vomiting, and a few times seemed to choke on it and even stopped breathing for a few seconds. I will never forget the look of panic in his eyes when that happened.

From the first time he aspirated, he began to have breathing problems. He was almost always "junky" and wheezy, and had a loud stridor when he slept. Stridor is a high pitched wheezing sound, almost as if you are gasping for air. We began to be very concerned. The second time he did it, we actually took him to the Urgent Care because we were worried that the vomit had gotten into his lungs. They took X-Rays and said that it looked like he might have aspirated the vomit. This was a new term for me, I wasn't familiar with aspiration and what it was, but I learned very quickly! For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, aspiration is when his airway doesn't get protected when he swallows, so it goes into his lungs instead of his tummy. We ended up in the Urgent Care a few more times to make sure he didn't have Aspiration Pneumonia, luckly, through it all, we managed to avoid it, not sure how, but I'm not complaining! We tried switching to a different elemental formula because there have been extremely rare cases where a child will be allergic to one elemental formula, but can tollerate a different one. It didn't make anything better, in fact, the first week of him adjusting to the new formula was awful, his tummy did not like the change.
  

Feeding began to be a stressful time at our house. With most bottles, he would take almost the full amount (4 oz) and then just before he would be finished, he would projectile vomit it all back up. Then, he started taking less and less at each feed. He went from taking 4 oz every 3 hours, to finally 1/2 to an ounce every three hours or so, and even that was a fight. It would take about an hour to get him to take that small amount. He was sleeping on average 22 out of the 24 hours in a day. He would wake for 30 minutes at a time and then be exhausted and fall back asleep. Things got so bad, he was getting 8-10 oz in 24 hours. I called the GI's office and told them that they had to do something because my baby could not continue to go on like this any longer. They scheduled an emergency appointment with the GI for the following day at the main office which is on the hospital campus, in case he needed to be admitted.