WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY BABY?

Over the last few months, Patricks health appears to have deteriorated. Don't panic, this isn't anything too traumatic, but it has been a seriously worrying and stressful time of late. Hence, you may have noticed small absences across my blog because when you have a poorly baby without a shadow of a doubt he's come first and ultimately that means my little corner of the internet has been on the back foot. I wanted to write about this as the situation unfolded, but we had no resolution, I didn't want to put the problem out there without solving it. However, we're here now a full five months later and I think, I really do think, we're so close to finding out exactly what it is that has made our baby boy so poorly.

It all began back in March / April, coincidentally as I returned to work. Frustrating of course as nobody wants to be missing time from their job when they've only just arrived back on the scene post maternity leave. Thankfully, I have such a supportive bunch of ladies, they've been nothing but understanding and helpful. Anyway, back to March. Initially I expected Patrick to get every cold and bug that did it's rounds, because he was new to nursery and he'd been protected by me in our little maternity leave bubble for ten months. Just as I suspected, he did, and it wasn't long before a vomiting bug appeared to take hold of my boy. Being a nursery nurse and a Mother already to Noah, this wasn't my first time around the block so I prepared the house with dioralyte and braced for the tantrums when he had to be without food for twenty four hours. Persevering through my boy got better and the house felt harmonious again, I knew it wouldn't be long before he built up that resilience to germs most nursery children get but I was wrong, merely days later it knocked him again and we were back on the dioralyte. This time though, it required a doctors visit, temperatures wouldn't lower and with projectiles coming from both ends, enough was enough. 'It's viral' 'Just one of those things' 'He's just unlucky, catching one thing after another' the spiel we've grown to know over the past few months, and one we've grown to hate too. Every time Patrick appeared to recover, something else took hold and at twelve months old, he just couldn't keep fighting every day.

It became a bit of an eye rolling moment in our household, phone calls from nursery, high temperatures, sickness, diarrhoea, the circle was endless and oh my was it vicious. The above process repeated itself before I came to the conclusion that it had to be an intolerance. Nobody picks up bugs this often, and yes Patrick was premature but his immune system was no different to anybody else as far as we were aware. It quickly matched up with around the time we had switched Patrick to cows milk, so that immediately rang a few alarm bells, though initially we'd looked over it as being a problem as he had cows milk in his cereal for some time prior - with no adverse effects. As a precaution we moved to soy milk, and things appeared to improve if only for a fortnight. By the end of July we were stuck in the sickness cycle again and I started to worry. Was something more sinister going on? Will the doctors think I'm crazy constantly taking my son to them? Will they blame me? What's wrong with my son!? I felt a bit guilty, he'd been great when he was home with me all of those months, should I have became a stay at home mum, perhaps then I'd have a happy healthy baby? But deep down I knew that something more had to be going on with him, and we just had to find out what that was.

Earlier this month, I booked a doctors appointment after we could no longer finish a week without a bout of sickness. Sometimes it was a single vomit, other times it would last days, life was unpredictable and my baby was hurting. I was really getting worked up, I knew if this carried on there was absolutely no way my baby could thrive, I even flashed back to when I suffered with hyperemesis gravidarum and how horrendous I felt constantly throwing up, I could only imagine what that felt like for a tiny baby. Thankfully, the GP listened, she too couldn't believe this was a bug playing such havoc with him and wanted to get to the bottom of it just as much as us. So, we came up with a plan together, dairy is to be completely cut out, it doesn't matter what he could tolerate in the past because he clearly can't take it anymore. We've kept a diary for the past fortnight and with our second appointment looming, we're hoping we can correlate the sickness to a food group and thus, pinpointing an allergy. And, if not? It's a paediatrician referral and more investigating. Thus far, since being dairy free (a whole week as I write this) we've had no problems, he's slept better than he has for months and I'm slowly starting to believe we've found the solution to our problem. There is nothing worse than seeing your baby in pain, poorly, helpless. You feel as though you're failing as a parent. We've never had to deal with any allergies as both me, John and Noah are pretty boring when it comes to intolerance and we rack up a grand total of zero between us. I'm hoping whatever allergy Patrick has, it's temporary but as long as my baby is healthy and happy again, that's all that truly matters.