New GI Doc & Amateur Dietitians

One of the great side benefits of the feeding program was they got us in to see a new GI Doc in Dallas. We'd been considering a second opinion for a few months, but since we had no referrals and it takes months to get an appointment anyway, we'd been dragging our feet. The therapists were really concerned about the frequency of emesis (new word learned in therapy) during Sophie's feeds. It happens 25% + of the time. This seemed normal to us since we've been dealing with it for a year, but they were concerned enough to get us in with a doctor they deal with.

The new doctor is awesome! I'm sure he's no more qualified than the FW doc we've been seeing for a year, but he did a much better job of communicating with us. He confirmed that the constant throw up with resulting no weight gain is indeed a concern. With our last doc, I got the distinct impression that his plan was to just keep telling us to come back in another 3 months hoping that the problem would go away. Maybe it will, but that doesn't inspire much confidence. The new doctor actually outlined the potential ways to deal with it in order of preference. He even gave us a print-out of the plan for treatment. We've been on a new medicine for about a week and can't really tell if it's working yet. Still, I feel confident that we'll find something that works because the new Doc said so.

Brian & I have become amateur dietitians. I'm sure all parents worry about whether the little one gets enough to eat, but when your 16 month old is still only 18 pounds and you have the technology to force formula in, you count calories. We're actively weening off the g-button now. Sophie gets about 1/3 of her calories by mouth. She'd get more than that if they'd just stay down. Regular adult food has a lot more calories than baby food, so we've become adept with the blender. Blendarizing with whipping cream adds calories in a hurry. We've also got a powder called Duocal that adds calories.

Memorial Day weekend was spent making batches of food and counting the calories per gram. We blended up pancakes, mac & cheese, carrots, and beef & veggie soup. There's more work to do to get some variety in the freezer, but it's a start. With each feed, we measure the grams of food and milliliters of drink taken, subtract anything that came back, and count the calories. We probably won't be so rigorous for too long, but we're working hard at it until we see some weight gain.