It's Sunday morning at 5 a.m. I was awakened a few minutes ago by the faint beeping of the feeding pump alarm through the baby monitor. This is just another reason why Stacey and I go to bed at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday nights. Going to bed early has been happening a lot lately, but that's just the way our bodies ensure we get our eight hours every night.
Sometimes I type up blog entries a few days after the date listed on the post, since I try to keep the date on the blog near or on the day the event actually happened. On Monday, Jonathan started showing signs of improvement from his allergic reaction. By the afternoon, he was back to his old self. By Tuesday, his appearance was almost completely back to normal as well. Thursday we had a good snow storm and two appointments. The main appointment was our follow up with Dr Waasdorp, our GI doctor. She wanted to see us sooner since Jonathan had not done well on the past two medications and then had an allergic reaction to the last. Nothing much happened at the other appointment, food therapy, except that Jonathan kept trying to hand the food back to the women working with him instead of eating it.
Nothing much came out of the appointment except some good information. We're going to try Bethanechol again, since shortly after we stopped using it, the rest of us got sick too. We're hoping that it was just that he got sick and not the medicine. This was my suggestion despite my skepticism. We're going to try him on it again for a week at a lower dose and see what happens.
Dr Waasdorp also agreed with the caloric approach of only giving him what he needs, which is somewhat contrary to the past GI doctor's approach. She also mentioned, that despite the variation among individuals, 100 cal/kg of body weight should easily be enough to see some growth. Since Jonathan's stomach is the bottleneck, her approach right now appears to be finding a medicine to help alleviate that problem. Other testing options mentioned were a cardiologist and an EKG, just to rule out any heart problems. That could be something that prevents growth and should be a fairly easy to run. He's been examined with a stethoscope, but sometimes problems can be missed. I don't think he's ever had his heart monitored except at birth.
Perhaps the best bet of news was that she's very confident Jonathan will grow out of this. Based on what she's seeing and how he's developing and acting in appointments, this doesn't seem like it's going to be a long term problem. I think in a lot of ways we're still just playing the waiting game, hoping that sooner or later he'll catch on to what he needs to do. He's still fairly young in that regard, but growing older and more aware every day.