This past Friday (09/26/08), I changed a diaper for Jace & found blood. I told Joe that the baby was passing blood. We immediately got out all the reading material we could find & everything told us to call the pediatrician. So I called the doctor, but the office was closed for lunch. Joe called Children's Hospital & asked if we should forgoe the dr & come straight to the hospital. zthey told him it would depend on the amount of blood loss. We had to pass by the dr's office on the way to the hospital & by the time we would go by there, they would be back from lunch break. So we stopped in the office. The dr pushed lightly on Jace's belly & blood came out of his bottom. He put the diaper back on & told us to get straight to the ER & not to stop anywhere on the way there. So we rushed to Children's Hospital ER. They did the triage fairly quickly, however we sat in a room waiting to see a doctor for about an hour. Once the doctor came in, they started taking blood samples and decided they were going to have an X-ray done. So Joe and I went with Pod to the X-ray room. I held his legs down and Joe held his arms. When we were done, we walked back to the ER room. When I put Jace down, I noticed there was blood on the blanket he was wrapped in. There was so much blood in his diaper that it had soaked through the diaper, through his clothing and through the blanket. I opened the diaper to find a huge puddle of blood. It was about 2 oz of blood. When I lifted his legs to clean him up, more blood just poured out of his bottom. I started to panic, but tried to remain as calm as possible. They wanted to do a CT scan, but needed to have the contrast bottle fed. It would take over a 2 hour period, however, Jace was bleeding so badly Joe demanded they treat this as they would any other trauma patient because the baby couldn't continue bleeding like this for two hours. So they ended up putting a tube down his nose and into his tummy. They extracted fluid to see if there was bleeding in the tummy. There wasn't any so they forced the contrast in to get the CT done quickly. The CT scan and X-rays were not showing any damage to the tummy or intestines that the ER doctor could see. She consulted with a GI doctor, the pediatric ICU doctor and surgeon. They had some blood on stand-by in case they needed to do a transfusion or surgery. The GI doctor suggested that this may be a food allergy rather than damage to the intestine, but the ER doctor had advised there was a lot of blood loss for a food allergy. GI doctor & PICU doctors both said that is normal. They decided to admit Pod to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. We spent two nights in the PICU and then they moved him to the floor. X-ray after X-ray and the scans were all coming back not showing any signs of damage to the intestines or tummy. They advised me that they felt this was a food allergy & told me that I was to stop nursing him. I needed to change my diet to exclude all dairy products (milk, cheese, etc), eggs, soy, nuts, and flour. I would remain on this strict diet for 2 weeks cleaning out my system. In the mean time I need to continue to pump so that I can go back to nursing once my system is cleansed of the allergens. Pod is on a prescription strength, hypoallergenic formula that has the proteins broken down. I am to feed him that for two weeks, then slowly re-introduce nursing. If I nurse and there is no blood in the stool, then I can slowly start introducing the allergens back one at a time starting with the one we feel is least likely to have caused this. I feel that it's probably a milk allergy since I drink so much milk (2 gallons a week). Anyway, I can drink rice milk and have been instructed to do so to keep the calcium intake up as pumping / nursing will take a lot of my calcium away.
Pod came home on Monday. He's doing really well now and hasn't had the slightest problem with the formula. He hasn't had one bloody stool since he was put on the formula. Now that I'm making bottles, Joe can help out with the feedings, too. That's a relief to me, too, but I want to nurse Pod so that he'll get his immunities. I hope he'll go back to it okay.
Well, that's all for now. I'll update this blog as often as I can. Lack of sleep & energy is keeping me from posting very frequently! LOL
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