My name is Brittney and this winter I had my first baby, a beautiful little boy, who currently has the nickname of Pants. It started out by me calling him Handsome Pants and then adapted to me calling him Grumpy Pants, Smiley Pants, Chatty Pants etc. Somehow along the way the adjectives were dropped and my husband and I have resorted to just calling him flat out Pants, which is how I plan on referring to him in this blog.
While I was pregnant I read everything I could get my hands on about how to take care of a baby, and exclusively breastfeeding my baby was very important to me.
My baby has been happy, healthy, and gained weight like a champ, if only he would sleep longer than 2 1/2 hours at a time my life would be complete. Perhaps the sleeping issue is due in part to his allergy, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Pretty much the day my baby turned 3 months something changed. Actually my baby didn't seem to notice the change at all, he still played well, ate well and slept normally but when I went to change his diaper it was loaded with bright red blood streaks. As a first time mother, naturally, I freaked out.
A quick call to the doctor calmed me down a little bit as they informed me that this was a very common thing to happen and generally was the result of a food allergy. The two most common culprits were dairy and soy, and I was to remove all things dairy and soy from my diet for two weeks and then come back in for a check up.
At my checkup he still had traces of blood in his stool and I was referred to a GI specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. (The one bright side of my husband going to school in Boston is that we have access to some of the nations top hospitals, and I was grateful we were going to have our baby seen by someone at such a great hospital)
This is what I was told from the Mass. General specialist (p.s. don't use this information to make a medical diagnosis, if you have a problem take your baby to the doctor!) Anyway, he said that until about 2 months the baby's immune system is too immature to launch a full on allergenic attack but at about 2 months the white blood cells start activating to recognize certain proteins and attacking when that protein is present (this is what allergies are) as long as the protein is present the cells will keep reproducing and keep attacking. When you take away the protein (such as by stopping dairy and soy) and there is no longer anything for these specific cells to attack they realize they are not needed and stop reproducing. When they all die off the sensitivity goes away. Good news, this means that if I get this under control he can still eat cake when he turns one without any adverse reactions, except maybe a sugar high.
The second insight the doctor gave us was that once you eat something with dairy or soy it takes about 2 weeks before you'll stop seeing blood, and another 4 weeks before the microscopic blood is actually gone. This means anything you accidentally eat can set you back months! The blood levels in the stool can fluctuate the whole time the attacking cells are present, so don't think that because you had peanuts a day or two ago and are seeing an increase in blood today that it's caused by the peanuts.
So before all this diet madness I was big on dairy, I had cereal for breakfast, yogurt for a snack, often a glass of milk in the evening and I thought that would be the hardest to give up, but I clearly had no idea that soy is a filler for everything. EVERYTHING! I'm talking bread, beans, crystal light, chewing gum, vegetable oil is strait up soybean oil, oh yeah and the one that took me a week or two to figure out multivitamins. Yikes! So be aware that nothing that is preprocessed is safe.
Because of all of this I have been eating a lot more fruits and veggies, but I needed more. I went online to find some recipes that were baby safe and was really frustrated when I was able to find things without dairy and without soy but rarely both so I've decided to start cataloging what I'm eating throughout the day in hopes that if you too are in this situation you'll be able to find food to feed yourself, keep up your nutrition, and keep breastfeeding your sweet baby.
No comments:
Post a Comment