Allergy Mum life!
(Hannah's experience. IM NOT A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL AND THIS IS JUST MY EXPERIENCE)
Second time mum, you think you've got it in the bag. You’ve already successfully grown a baby and they've turned out just fine, until a tiny, SCREAMING, UNHAPPY little baby comes along.
Alfie was always an unsettled baby even from a few weeks old. You would go to finally sit down after what seemed like hours of rocking/swaying/shushing, your bottom would just about touch the seat and the crying would start. So up you get to repeat whatever you just did to keep him quiet. I would say the first year of his life was possibly the hardest of my entire life. (I know this sounds completely dramatic and there is always so many more awful things going on in the world and thankfully this was only allergies).
Alfie wouldn't actually settle with anybody else but myself. I felt trapped and wanted to run away multiple times and scream. He didnt even like being in the car resulting in many times pulling over and trying to stop the upset.
So naturally all I was happy doing was staying at home in my safe place. There were many times in our journey where I had to lie him on the floor and just let him cry so I could bring myself back together and remain calm. Walking in to find Tommy (big brother) sat on the floor telling Alfie he is ok and he will be ok. sob
When Alfie was just 7 weeks old after trying everything over the counter for relief in colic and silent reflux we noticed he had blood in his stool which was streaky. We ended up in A&E which to be honest nobody knew why this was happening.
This went for a while before our next visit to a different hospital. Alfie was now 4 months old. This time i had researched ALOT on allergens in breast fed babies. After the hospital agreeing that it could possibly be dairy allergy (non iGe) & egg allergy (iGe). Only way to finding out is if I cut from my diet and it may work but may not. Well that was it NO dairy in my diet and NO egg, not even in the household. Egg was being a reactive allergy whereas dairy would be internal. Alfie's symptoms of milk allergy would be uncomfortable tummy, excessive wind, diarrhoea, blood in stool, eczema. Egg symtoms were hives.
The blood in his stool was still happening as well as very mucousy nappies, I decided that i wanted more help and more advice after feeling that health care had failed us up until this point, we were not in a good way. None of us had slept for months, every time I ate something I worried about how it would affect him. After feeling very low, miserable and completely sleep deprived I booked in to see a private allergy specialist.
I got alot of info and support from seeing Dr Helen in Bournemouth. I felt like seeing Dr Helen made me feel like everything I had been going through wiith Alfie made sense and I wasnt imaging everything.
Alfie was also taking omeprazole daily to help with his silent reflux. I felt alot more positive after this, until he was 9/10 months. I remember my last feed with Alfie and it didn't end well, he bit me. Well that was the end of our feeding journey. Coincidentally my mum had walked through the door, and we were both in tears, she walked me down to the doctors and from then onwards the boobs were bandaged up and Alfie had moved onto Neocate. (Which he also hated, until I added some vanilla essence in to make it taste the tiniest bit nicer). Over night my life changed. Not in terms of sleeping or feeding or screaming. But I knew that the breast feeding was too much for us. (hard to swallow when I had breastfed my eldest until he was 1) I don't know why we give ourselves a hard time about what feeding method is best for our babies.
Numerous hospital appts, allergy testing, dietician conversations and Health visitor appts over the last 2 years. Everything seems such a blur now. Although Alfie hasn't completed the milk ladder or the egg ladder yet. He can have various different types of food with dairy and egg included in the ingredient's. Alfie is my force of nature, he's my wild child, he's the child who can stand up for himself and fight back, I couldnt be prouder of the little boy he’s turned into. With the support of my family, friends and my amazing little boy Tommy, it made a extremly hard time better.
Always trust your mummy instinct, if something doesn’t feel right don't stop fighting until you've got answers. Surround yourself with people who love you and you love. The days seem so long and hard but it does always come to an end and life becomes easier and better.
And now for me! Not that I can really add much more than Hannah..
Jack, my first born! I couldn’t wait to be a mum, I had all these plans about maternity leave and spending time with my new little shadow.
My first hurdle was breast feeding. Jack just would not latch, they tried everything in the hospital - we had to resort to hand expressing colostrum into a syringe and feeding him by a cup. They assured me he was not tongue tied, and that I just needed to find a breast feeding position that worked for me.
They kept us in for four days, throughout this time I have never felt so out of my depth. He screamed, and screamed… and screamed some more. One particularly bad night, one of the midwives came and took him out of my room to their desk so I could try and sleep - I could still hear him screaming.
We tried white noise, dummies, anything we thought might work but nothing did. We were discharged home, me still not having mastered breast feeding but expressing breast milk every two hours.
I remember my midwife coming to the house, and asking how I was doing - I can remember telling her everything was going really well and pretending everything was okay - when in reality it was the opposite and I was hiding postpartum depression. I hid this for a further 9 months! In hindsight, I wish I had just been honest and asked for help.
My biggest support was my mum, I remember her taking me to the Doctors and saying that something wasn’t right with Jack and that I was exhausted - the Doctors response was ‘she’s a first time mum, babies cry’.
My mum would take it in turns with me to sleep on the sofa and take care of Jack while my partner worked long shifts as a Paramedic. Sometimes, it would get so bad that I would have to call him on shift and get him to come and check Jack over.
By four weeks, I had exclusively expressed milk for Jack but I was exhausted. We weren’t getting more than 30 minutes of sleep at a time (through the day or night!). I had to call it a day and move to formula.
After Doctors visits, Urgent Treatment Centre appointments and finally a trip to A&E - we were kept in. That really seemed to open the eyes of the healthcare workers, that this really was a very unsettled baby.
He was put on ranitidine initially, for suspected silent reflux and then later switched to omeprazole. We trialled Aptamil Pepti and then Neocate formula as they also realised there was a cows milk protein intolerance.
He had a private tongue tie assessment at 4 months (after being told numerous times he didn’t have one) and his tongue tie was cut at home by the most amazing tongue tie practitioner.
Jack has had sleep studies at Southampton Hospital for apnoeas (periods where he stops breathing) and has been under a consultant paediatrician since that hospital admission at 4 months. It is likely that he has enlarged adenoids and may need these to be surgically removed (we are on an ENT waiting list!).
I can honestly say, that I hated being a mum in that first year. It was nothing like what I imagined it would be, and I feel robbed of that experience. I was in the same boat as Hannah, in that he hated the car and I ended up becoming isolated from my friends.
My advice, is that if you find yourself trying to hide your postpartum feelings and emotions… don’t! There are services and groups out there that can help you, you don’t have to be on your own. Motherhood is tough, and each of us will cope with things differently. But the likelihood is, we will all have experienced fear, loneliness, isolation, anxiety and even anger during our journey.
But, we wouldn’t change them for the world right 😉
