Silent Reflux
13:26
My son Jackson got diagnosed with silent reflux by my health visitor. Silent reflux is apparently hard to get a diagnosis for according other parents on some online forms. So we are lucky that we have a health visitor who really listens to us. Reflux is where your baby brings up milk along with stomach acid into their mouths or gullet. Many baby's get some degree of reflux because their digestive system is still developing. Most of the time its not too much of a problem and most babies will grow out of it within the first year. However, like Jackson many babies have strong acid in their stomachs and it can really interrupt feeding, as we found out. At first I figured it might be colic where a baby will be crying for hours on end so I tried all kinds of things starting off with infacol, then gripe water, then we changed to comfort milk and we also tried colief of which none of them worked or they helped a little for a few days. Eventually after trying all these things my health visitor prescribed carobel to treat silent reflux and it has helped tremendously.
Normal reflux symptoms :
- waking often at night
- Comfort feeding to help with pain
- weight loss or poor weight gain
- Excessive crying or irritability during or after feeding
- Regurgitation
However what makes silent reflux more difficult to diagnose is the lack of outward symptoms, in other words they do not vomit the milk but instead they swallow it back down. So they actually gain a lot of weight and are seen to be thriving by most doctors. Which is what we were told when we took him into A&E at around 1 month old. Jackson had stopped taking his normal amounts of milk and had been sick quite a lot. However, while in the waiting room he started to get hungry so we tried him on a bottle and he took the whole lot and fell into a deep peaceful sleep. So when we went in to see the doctor he just saw a peaceful sleeping baby. He did not see all the screaming and crying that he had done previously when drinking his milk. So we got no help at the time and were not taken seriously. On a side note, why is it that you have to look like your deaths door to be taken seriously ? It happened with my preeclampsia/HELLP syndrome where I went to the doctor and told them I didn't feel right and was told that everything I was feeling was completely normal and no further tests were done. At least my midwife listened because things could have been a lot worse.
Anyhow, his current milk thickener seams to be working to keep all the milk in his tummy rather than on his jumpers. I urge anyone to push past the colic label and try to get some help for acid reflux if they are extremely fussy while feeding or just go on a milk strike. Our little ones cannot tell us that their little throats are burning so its up to us as parents to try and make our babies as comfortable as possible and at least try and figure out whats up!
Anyhow, his current milk thickener seams to be working to keep all the milk in his tummy rather than on his jumpers. I urge anyone to push past the colic label and try to get some help for acid reflux if they are extremely fussy while feeding or just go on a milk strike. Our little ones cannot tell us that their little throats are burning so its up to us as parents to try and make our babies as comfortable as possible and at least try and figure out whats up!
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