Experiment

So, I decided to do an experiment yesterday. Bella has been doing AMAZING lately. We've had her on the Nutramigen A.A. along with Nexium. She has been acting like a normal, healthy baby! She's been smiling, talking, and starting to laugh. Last week there were two days in a row that I didn't give her the medicine until the evening. It has to be given at least an hour before eating (or it doesn't work), and I just kept forgetting until it was already time for her to eat. I noticed that those days she was very fussy. At first I thought maybe the reflux was getting bad again, and I was SO disappointed. But then I realized the timing of my giving her the medication and thought that might be a part of it. And, thankfully that was all the problem was.

I started to think yesterday about what happened last week, and decided to try to change her milk back to the Alimentum (the one that has broken down milk proteins). I knew that the medicine was helping....and that even the time of day that it is distributed makes a difference. And she has been doing SO good, that I would know quickly if the change in milk was making her sick or not. After I gave her the first bottle, she was a little fussy, but I thought maybe it was just because she was tired. I was able to get her to go to sleep shortly after her feeding. A few hours later when she awoke, she even more fussy. I decided to try one more feeding of Alimentum because maybe she was really fussy because she was hungry now. She finished the bottle, and it all went downhill from there. She was increasingly fussy throughout the evening, and was crying incosolably. Today she hasn't been quite as fussy, but has been spitting up constantly....and not just a little at a time either. I feel SO bad! I keep telling her I am so sorry. I just thought that maybe the medicine was helping so much that the milk didn't need to be broken down all the way. I thought that maybe she was getting a little better with each change of milk with less and less proteins in them because it was just easier to digest, but not that she necessarily had a milk protein allergy. Now I'm pretty sure that's part of the problem. The doctors were never sure, since being on the milk with no medicine didn't help either. It has to be the milk with no milk proteins along with the medication. I was really hoping that we could slowly get her back to normal formula....but it looks like we're in this for the long run. I have no idea how long, but it will probably be a few more months before I try anything else. Next time I think we'll try soy again. Last time I tried that, she couldn't hold it down very well, although that may have been from the reflux. Who knows. That's the sad thing about this whole situation, is that it's all just trial and error, and poor Bella has to go through the pain of it all. But, who wants to be paying SO MUCH for formula, along with having to special order it, and also purchase cases of it at a time, if she could be handling something much cheaper that we can just buy in the store. Anyway, I guess we'll wait and see the next time.