Saturday, May 30, 2009

My Children's Struggle With Eating

Let me start by saying that my twin boys were born "full" term at 37 weeks via scheduled C section on the day after Christmas. I was prepared and making a valiant effort to breastfeed both of them immedaitely after they came into this world. I bought a hospital grade pump and I nursed as much as possible. It seemed as though Cole had the better latch at first and was actually getting the hang of things. I noticed right away that he had a tongue tie and wondered if this was making it hard for him to suck. But the lactation consultant assured me that his latch was perfect. Now we just had to get Jake more comfortable with it. A couple of days after I arrived home, Cole suddenly stopped wanting to nurse and Jake finally got the hang of it. So I pumped milk for Cole and nursed Jake. This became very tedious and time consuming. Nursing, pumping and bottle feeding for 2 kids. Ridiculous if you ask me. So I went back to our pediatrician and asked if Cole's tongue tie was causing the issue with latching. They assured me that wasn't the case. But they left me feeling stressed about his lack of weight gain and encouraged me to add formula to his diet. I was reluctant because I wanted to succeed so badly at breastfeeding my twin boys. We kept on like this for 2 months. Pumping, nursing, bottle feeding, pumping, nursing bottle feeding 16 times a day. I must have blocked most of these memories out because they seem so hazy to me now. Put it this way, it was freaking rough. Around the 2 month mark, Cole started refusing the breast milk that I was pumping for him. He was arching his back and screaming out in pain. I took him to the pediatrician again (who was closely monitoring his weight gain and thus made me very paranoid that he wasn't drinking enough) and he diagnosed him with reflux. This was based on nothing. Seriously, he just made a guess because its pretty common but had no hard evidence that his refusal to drink was due to reflux. I asked about the tongue tie once again because it looked pretty tight at the front of his tongue. It even seemed like he was having a hard time moving his tongue at all. But the pediatrician assured me the tonuge was nothing. They don't cut frenulums these days anyway. There is no proven pathology related to eating, so he said. He suggested I put Cole on hypoallergenic formula ($9 per 32 oz = insanity) and prescribed him some zantac. Nice, now my 2 month old son is on medication. Obviously this was all prior to me reading The Hundred Year Lie. So I followed the Dr.'s advice and put Cole on Alimentum and zantac. Didn't work. In fact, it got worse. We wound up in the hospital at 3 months for fear that Cole would dehydrate because he refused to drink anything. They ran all sorts of tests, a barium swallow and an endoscopy, everything turned up negative but they still diagnosed it as reflux?? They prescribed a proton pump inhibitor called prevacid which was supposed to stop all acid production in his stomach. But he still wouldn't drink!! After 5 miserable days we took Cole home on an NG tube. I call this the dark period in our lives. 7 times a day I would have to pour Cole's formula in an IV bag, hook it up to a pump that was attached to the tube that ran up his nose and down his throat. I was also trained to remove and re insert the tube. HORRIBLE experience. I need not say more. That poor baby must have endured hell to keep this intrusive plastic tube in his esophagus 24/7 for three months. The feedings took 45 minutes to pump all the formula into his stomach and if I moved him from his bouncy chair too soon he would vomit it all up. Nightmare. I cried everyday from this experience. Somedays though, I found that if Cole was sleeping and I slipped a bottle in his mouth he would drink and not have a problem. So I tried to feed him most of his bottles when he was sleeping just to avoid that horrendous pump. We enrolled him into a feeding therapy clinic as soon as we could. It took about 2 months from when we were released from the hospital. To my surprise, the first thing they recommended was to get his tongue tie clipped (frenulectomy). I was upset that my pediatrician disagreed when these therapists said they had seen cases like this where the child refuses to eat because he can't move his tongue to the back of his mouth to swallow. I could understand this, it made perfect sense. So I made an apopintment with an ENT and went for an eval. He was hesitant to cut the frenulum but since Cole was already on an NG tube he felt my pain and wanted to test it out. The surgery was scheduled for July 19 which was exactly 3.5 months after the hospital stay where Cole got the NG tube. He was sedated under general anesthesia and the procedure took 5 minutes total. The ENT brought my little Cole back to me all out of it, but when I stuck a pacifier in his mouth he immediately sucked it!! He hadn't sucked a paci in 3.5 months. I started to cry. We then gave him some pedialyte in a bottle and he sucked it down. The ENT was in disbelief but he did tell me that Cole's frenulum was very long and very thick once he was cutting into it. Apparently he couldn't tell how long and thick it was just by looking at it, he needed to cut into it. We took Cole home and for 2 days he drank his bottles. I was overjoyed and felt a weight taken off my shoulders. I could finally breathe again. I stopped the reflux meds, took the tube out and never looked back.

Welcome to the world of feeding aversions. Because of all the pain and suffering Cole endured with his tongue and the tube, he was not a big fan of eating at all. I struggled to get him to drink 20oz of formula a day. By now he was 7 months old and maybe 15lbs? We were starting solids and that helped a ton because it was delivered via spoon and not bottle. He would sample a little carrot and a little squash here and there but was starting to reduce the amount of formula he was drinking per day. On a good day we got in 20oz normally it was about 15oz and not enough for him to gain any weight. That is when I learned about Coconut oil.

Coconut oil has been used to cook with for centuries. Many asian cultures use coconut oil as their main cooking oil (instead of olive or vegetable). The wonderful thing about coconut oil is that it is a medium chain fatty acid which does not contribute to high cholesterol or plaque build-up in the arteries. It also contains lauric acid which is found in breast milk. Most astonishing to me was the detoxifying properties that coconut oil has. Taken over time it can reduce the build up of heavy metals and other toxins in the body and since all reflux meds contain aluminum, I was concerned that Cole had too many heavy metals already in his short lifetime. So I started adding a teaspoon of coconut oil to his bottles 3 times a day. This was a tablespoon in total and gave him an extra 140 calories per day. We finally started to see some weight gain.

Taken from organics.net, these are some of the health benefits of coconut oil: "hair care, skin care, stress relief, maintaining cholesterol levels, weight loss, increased immunity, proper digestion and metabolism, relief from kidney problems, heart diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, HIV and cancer, dental care, and bone strength. These benefits of coconut oil can be attributed to the presence of lauric acid, capric acid and caprylic acid, and its properties such as antimicrobial, antioxidant, antifungal, antibacterial, soothing, etc."
I am so happy I found this wonderful oil. I cook with it in most of my recipes (unless olive oil is specifically called for) and I occasionally use it as butter. I take coconut oil capsules everyday to strengthen my immunity and add it to my kid's purees. The eating aversion has not completely gone away yet but we're working around it by adding superfoods such as the coconut oil as well as other things I will discuss in future posts.

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