Feeding
One of the great things about babies: unless there’s some reason to, you don’t really have to put them on a feeding schedule. Their bodies want to grow and they know how much food they need to make it happen. So when they’re ready to eat, they’ll let you know.*Well, that’s true of most babies, but then, most babies eat do most of their eating through their mouths, not through a special button which delivers food directly to their stomach. This throws a variable into the mix that I don’t think a baby’s body is ready for.
Or is it? That’s one of the problems with having a “special needs” baby. You can’t trust them to let you know what they need. Nor can you trust your instincts. Sometimes you can’t even trust your own common sense.
So we got released from the hospital on Saturday afternoon. They were able to determine that the baby didn’t have an infection. But that meant we weren’t really sure what the problem was.
That’s the problem with the practice of medicine on babies. Babies can’t tell you what’s wrong with them. So there’s a lot of guesswork. The GI doctor’s working theory is that Gus’s tummy wasn’t able to handle breastmilk going straight into it. Either that or something Mrs. J was eating was making the breast milk hard for Gus to tolerate.
So they put Gus on some (outragously expensive) formula and told Mrs. J to stop eating a few things. One of them was corn products. Do you know what all has high fructose corn syrup? Answer: everything! I’ll let Mrs. J comment on that aspect. I gave up everything worth eating a few years ago.
Anyway, the plan is to do formula through the button for a week, then try breast milk. If the breast milk still doesn’t work, we’ll have to take out a second mortgage to afford more of this formula. Did I mention how expensive it is?
Well, that had been the plan, but then they did a “swallow study”, where they had Gus swallow some barium dye and then did an x-ray to see if it wasn’t going into his lungs. Well, the exciting news is that, unlike all the other times we’d done the study, Gus was swallowing like a champ! Everything was going in the stomach, and none of it was going in the lungs.
So our altered plan was to feed Gus through a bottle, see how much he ate, and then do the rest in his button. Because we had to give Gus 95 mL of fomula, or about 4 oz, every three hours. Why three hours? Why 95 mL? Where did those numbers come from? I don’t know. Those are just what they gave to us.
This wasn’t working so well. Well, the bottle feeding part went great. Gus has taken to the bottle like you wouldn’t believe. It’s just the button feeding. We set the feeding put to go for 30 minutes, and the poor baby would start screaming and crying for the last ten minutes, and need at least ten minutes of holding and rocking to calm down afterwards.
We don’t know for sure, but we think it’s because his stomach is still underdeveloped and small. We don’t know if he’s able to handle that much at one time. Or maybe it’s something else. Who knows?
And then he’d often start crying the 15 minutes before he was supposed to be fed. Now instincts or common sense might tell you, “Well, gosh, maybe the baby is hungry.” But since he doesn’t tell you what’s wrong, you start thinking of all the other things it could be. “Is the button making him uncomfortable? Is he just tired?” The tired explaination makes sense since he otherwise spent so much time crying. And besides, you have this chart which says he doesn’t get fed until 2 p.m.
We tried that for a day, and we decided that something had to give. Nobody was happy. The problem was that Gus needs to put on weight, but he was having trouble handling all the food he needs to make that happen. What could we do? But this morning, Gus ate a whopping 2 oz in one sitting. Amazing! He was halfway through his usual feeding. So maybe, if we fed him half as much, twice as often, he’d get all the food he needs and would be quite a bit less miserable.
So we decided to see what would happen if we just fed him every time he seemed upset. We kept track how much he was eating, and if he still hadn’t had 95 mL after three hours, we’d do the button feeding. After three hours, he had eaten more than 95 mL. What’s more, he looked happier than he’d looked in days. I was highly optimistic. Mrs. J was very cautiously optimistic.
So we skipped the button feeding that three hour block. And the next one. And the one after that. The only issue was, what do we do about the night time? We kicked that one around and decided if Gus is hungry enough, he’ll wake up and let us know he’s hungry. We decided that if we wake him up to feed him, we’ll just be reducing the amount of food he wants durning the day. Besides, he’s a growing boy. He needs sleep. We all do. I’ll keep you posted on that.
Basically, Gus is eating like a regular baby. We feed him when he cries, and don’t force anything on him. Although we’re still keeping close watch on how much he has.
Mrs. J is still cautiously optimistic, but I think this is terrific.
And the moral of the story, besides the fact that Gus is awesome, is that there’s a lot of guessing in medicine. Sure, doctors are making very educated guesses, what with their decade or so of training. But parents spend way more time watching the baby and thinking about him than they do. Sometimes you need to just trust yourself.
* Adults’ bodies also know what they need, except that most adults’ diets are pretty awful. So the body’s usual signals about when and how much to eat ends up getting drowned out by the signal for more Chili Cheese Fritos.
