Failure To Thrive
Next Entries »A belated Christmas story
Thursday, January 18th, 2007The lead up to Christmas was massively exciting this year with two preschoolers to whip each other into a frenzy over Father Christmas and all the attendant excitement that the holiday season brings.
We read Christmas stories by candlelight before bedtime. We made advent calendars. We coloured in one hundred and three Christmas colouring book pictures. We wrote to Father Christmas. Five times. Because we kept thinking of other things we wanted. (My hopes of a less material Christmas now that Eldest Son is no longer in school and influenced by his peers went completely out the window. Or up the chimney.)
We had my in-laws for Christmas. Hopes for a rowdy, drunken Christmas (most likely my father-in-law’s last) were dampened by our poorly dog needing peace and quiet to live out her last few days quietly in the corner and by my devastation at the thought that we would have to have her put down either on Christmas Day itself or Boxing Day. The children were wild with excitement over their Scalextric and Lightning McQueen toys, oblivious of course to the undercurrent of sadness about Matthew’s father or about Brin. But when Brin was given a reprieve by the vet on Boxing Day - when we were due to join my side of the family - I felt able to finally celebrate Christmas.
Since Christmas we have celebrated a fifth birthday, a first birthday and the purchase of a pair of walking shoes for my youngest son for he has decided that life is much more interesting, and unsteady, when upright and moving independently. I also considered buying a crash helmet along with the shoes but opted instead for walking the hallways over and over and over again as he finds his feet (sometimes literally when he gets confused as to how the whole walking thing happens). Oh, so much walking. But I multitask: while I can’t exactly implement my new ‘family and household stuff comes first’ policy while guiding him around the house, I can read one of the many, many books I received for my birthday and for Christmas. So I’m reading, losing weight and teaching the baby to walk. It’s hardly running a multi-national company, but you know, it’s something. I think.
But now I have the most important thing to include here: THE BABY IS SLEEPING THROUGH! And if I’m shouting that at you, that’s because I’m shouting it here, usually every hour as I celebrate the possibility of a whole night’s sleep (with Brin so sick I was up with her all though the nights when he started sleeping though and since then various toddlers and my grief-related insomnia have conspired to prevent me from an uninterrupted night’s sleep so far). Fourteen months of being up every two to three hours! I’m sure I will look back on these baby-days one day and laugh! But not any time soon I think. Next stop: get him out of my bed and in his own cot!
This sleeping through has a second, less self-centred, importance. It means Ben is getting enough nutrition in the day so that he is not hungry. And in fact, about a week after he started sleeping through, he started eating. Really eating. I could weep just thinking about it now. I haven’t had him weighed but I can’t believe he won’t be putting on weight now. He is still massively constipated so that will be one for the paediatric consultant to get to grips with at the next appointment, hopefully not literally, but the relief that he is finally eating is overwhelming.
And so now, I can start to wean him! Which means after nearly six years of near-constant pregnancy and/or breastfeeding I can have a glass of wine and get drunk! Because that is all it will take!
It also means I will have to stop eating in the vague hope that my increased calories would somehow pass through to my failing-to-thrive baby via the milk. Which means no more pastries and cakes. I will have to lose that last bit of pregnancy weight, I will have no more excuses.
Or else I will have to invent some other ones.
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Failure to thrive
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006My youngest son had a rough start to life in a brightly-lit operating theatre on a gloomy night in January. Now a bouncing, smiley eight months old, he has nonetheless had a number of minor health problems which have combined to make him feel pretty miserable and irritable. A urine infection several months ago meant long-term antibiotics and tests to check that his kidneys function as they should. Eczema and food allergies have severely restricted what he can eat, be bathed in, have his clothes laundered in, even whose skin he can touch. Chronic constipation - and I’m talking really chronic - has meant that he has been on suppositories for the last two months and dosed up with lactulose ’softener’. He has not reached the ‘being able to sit unaided’ milestone. Despite a good start to weaning he now eats about two teaspoons of food a day in total.
To say I have been unhappy with his progress would be an understatement. At his seven month review with the doctor I expressed, not for the first time, how concerned I was and asked for Ben to be referred to a specialist but because he is already under the care of a urology paediatrician at the hospital he was not referred for other investigation. A ‘wait and see’ approach was considered to be the best course of action. But he continued to not eat, showing no appetite, and he continued to fail to put on weight.
After feeling like I was a neurotic first time mother for worrying about this - after all I’m a third-time mother, I’m an expert now right? - he was weighed again today and officially diagnosed as ‘failing to thrive’.
The paediatrician will be calling me tomorrow about the next steps to take to get Ben back on track. But I still feel like he is slipping through the net and I’m scared, really scared, for his long term outlook.
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Not so worried about relieving the congestion at the top end
Thursday, September 14th, 2006The baby is desperately constipated. Watching him in such pain has been awful and we have tried everything medical and otherwise in the book to sort out his intestines without much joy. But I think I’ve found the solution: with cold season upon us again Ben has suffered with a series of nasty colds and because he has had difficulty breathing I have been searching for a nasal aspirator. For some reason nasal aspirators are frowned upon in the UK and therefore difficult to find. So I turned to the net and I found just the thing. But when I looked at the picture all I thought was: THIS NASAL ASPIRATOR FRIGHTENS ME BUT YOU CAN BET IT WOULD SORT OUT HIS CONSTIPATION.
(I’m sure I hardly need to point this out, but if you need to see my policy on Transparent Blogging click here.)
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Nose bags and penises
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006Three weeks ago this evening we had asparagus for supper. The next morning Ben, who at five months is still exclusively breastfed apart from something like a huge bowl of porridge at breakfast, a large bowl of baby rice at lunch and a dinner plate full of apple puree, had what I have come to learn is called “malodorous urine”. Stinking wee. Ha!, I thought to myself, it must be true: everything I eat or put on or in my body is linked to what he gets in breastmilk. Therefore my abstinence from alcohol and large amounts of caffeine has been worthwhile after all, because it definitely hasn’t felt worthwhile to me. I need that cappucino in the morning to get through the school run without crashing the car from sleep deprivation and I need that evening glass of wine to get through the witching hour without murdering everything in sight.
Two days later the smell was still pronounced. He was also constipated. Ever tried to get that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube by squeezing it so hard that you feel like your thumb might dislocate because if you don’t then there is no way you are going to get laid by that gorgeous guy waiting in the other room while you brush your teeth and fadgewash? That’s what the boy’s constipation was like.
Because of the constipation I made the next logical leap. He’s dehydrated! Hence constipation and also ergo, his wee will stink! I checked his fontanelle (good mother). It looked fine so I thought, he just needs a bit more milk, maybe a bit of water if that doesn’t work (also, good mother).
The days pass in a sort of blur in this household. I’m lucky if I can remember whether it is Monday or Thursday and some weeks I seem to miss out a whole day of the week. I don’t know where it goes. Perhaps it’s God’s way of rewarding me for getting through the week: I know, I’ll just scrap a day so Ella can get to Friday in one piece. The stinky wee didn’t get any better but the constipation was still there. I fed him more to rehydrate him and auto-piloted my way through the days. Then last Thursday I thought: shit! it’s two weeks since the asparagus. He still stinks. I mean you could smell his wet nappy from across the room, well not really, but almost! So I drove down to the doctors to get a penis-bag. It’s not what they’re really called but that’s what they are and I can’t imagine what they’re really called if not penis-bag. It’s like a horse’s nose bag but for a boy’s, you know, thing. If you’re feeling really creative, or cruel depending on your point of view, you can attach the bag so that the penis and tentacles are all squished inside the transparent bag, making them look like they have been artfully displayed for passers-by. Nappy on and, voila, a clean urine specimen awaits at the next nappy change. It helps of course to keep checking the nappy because the problem with constipation is that, with him, little and often is popular and it is possible to get through several nose bags that have a lovely clean urine sample inside them but are covered in yellow pollyfilla-type poop. And desperate as I was to get a sample to the doctor’s given my shockingly tardy assessment of the whole stinking wee situation there was no way I was taking down a bag of sterile wee with that on the outside.
Eventually a clean sample in a clean bag was obtained and off I shot, nearly running over the neighbour’s cat, which would have been no bad thing seeing as it sits on Matthew’s car scratching the paintwork and leaving little deposits, and perhaps encouraging me to attach a little nose-bag to its appendages, and handed the bag over as if it were the crown jewels. Hell, by this stage it felt more important than the crown jewels. Save the proud parent moments for the other parents at the school nativity play; my boy can pee in a bag when I most need him to and I might just have felt like telling the whole waiting room at the doctor’s surgery just that.
In his office, “hasn’t your eldest son just had a UTI?,” the doctor questions suspiciously. “In fact….,” looking at the screen he deliberates, “he’s having antibiotics now?” “Yes, but I think Ben also has a urine infection.” He looks at me slowly. “He’s teething you say? I would think it’s highly unlikely this is a urine infection, particularly if he’s not showing any other symptoms. I’ll send it off for analysis, but I expect you’ll find it comes back clear.”
This is why mothers are made like lionesses prepared to fight to the death for their lion cubs. Because my doctor always knows more than a mother’s instinct. Always, because he’s so educated and clever and, you know, superior to mothers who are always fretting needlessly over their children. Especially first time mothers! First time mothers should be vetted before being allowed near this doctor’s office because, my God, they waste so much of the doctor’s time, what with all their wittering and worrying!
So having been made to feel like a neurotic time-waster I went home thinking I was a neurotic time-waster. All that worry about stinking nappies and stuff. I was to call Monday for the results but they weren’t in. “Call Tuesday,” I was told knowledgeably. Nothing Tuesday. But that okay, I reasoned, it’s not a urine infection so there’s no chance his kidneys are being scarred so I’ll call Wednesday. Nothing Wednesday. By today, with the smell worse than ever, still no results. Please call the lab I pleaded, he’s not well. Then, at two o’clock, the phone rang. “It’s a UTI, you need to bring Ben in straight away and we’ll start antibiotics,” said the doctor with a trace of sheepishness.
My poor boy has been in some pain and at some risk of permanent kidney damage because I am, frankly, useless. And there’s no other way I can dress it up.
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