Weekly thread, July 4-11 - Page 8

[jsh7809]

Originally Posted by loveneverfails

Mercy had her doctor appointment today for her 2 month check up. Her doctor is now basically agreeing that she probably never had an infection, and that her respiratory problems were caused by fluid overload and stress from probable placental abruption. So, I am feeling more vindicated right now.

The possibility of PTSD has occurred to me. I think I probably have "features" of PTSD, but i don't know that I reach the criteria for diagnosis. It was really helpful to me to feel listened to and like our doctor cared. He was asking the right questions in a way that showed he was listening and open to possibilities other than "neonatologists are always right!"

Yay for caring, listening health care providers! Sadly, far too rare in our world. When I had some milder aspects of PTSD (flashbacks, nightmares, panic) after my birth trauma, I found that figuring out what exactly had happened helped a lot. Sounds like you're finding that for your situation too

AFM, pretty sure the Zoloft is causing my all over itching. Sigh. So now I have to titrate down to nothing and hope that the SAMe and other supplements will help keep me from falling back in the PPD hole. ARGH. The good news is that my herbalist thinks the SAMe was helping me more than the Zoloft, since it starts working earlier, but... I'm still feeling pretty fragile.

In other news - I wish this baby would stop blaming me for her inability to find her hands!

[OneWithTwo]

I obviously have preemies, but they just stay small until a year.
Although at 5 months, C weighed more than what J does now. However, J was IUGR and we didn't expect him to weigh more than 3lbs at birth and he was.
At 1, C weighed 12lbs though. I feel J will surpass that, but at 5 months he isn't 10lbs. I am completely happy with it though. That's like 6lbs since birth!

They told me the average 3 month old weighs almost 17lbs when we were in the hospital..now that's crazy!

[jenfl]

lnf -- Glad your doc was supportive! Our ped was also very supportive of us; I think that if we'd taken Sprout in to see her the day he was born and had her to contact when things got weird that evening, we probably wouldn't have ended up in the hospital. As it was, she was willing to back us on getting out of the NICU on Saturday even if Sprout's respiratory rate wasn't down to exactly normal. Having that support helped a LOT.

AFM -- May have to miss the nurse-in tomorrow. Apparently, it's at a very popular park that often fills up, so they recommend getting there at opening to be guarenteed to get in -- and opening is 8am! We live an hour away and, because of DH's work schedule, wouldn't even be able to leave the house until 9am. I'm not going to drag two kids in the car for an hour if we won't even be able to participate.

[ivymae]

Originally Posted by erickalynne

They told me the average 3 month old weighs almost 17lbs when we were in the hospital..now that's crazy!

Yikes - Becky is 3 months and 16.5 lbs, and in the 98th percentile. Average would be the 50th percentile, so I'm thinking someone was pulling stats out of their bum.

Today has been a rollercoaster. I just want one calm, level day! gah! I'm going to look into SAMe - how much are you taking Jess? (I have a herbalist appointment in TWO weeks - gah again!)

[laughingfox]

percentiles: Those charts are pretty darn old. I don't have the link at the moment, but I once read a study that found that 40% of kids nowadays are above the 75% mark.

This baby has been a big silly today. She's refusing to finish her bottles, and then getting hungry again after it's been too long for the bottle to be good anymore, so I have to make another one. I'm making smaller amounts per bottle at the moment (and I'll make more if she finishes it), but man, it's annoying.

She's in a really good mood and has been super active today, so I don't think anything's wrong, she's just being difficult. Silly girl.

[crazyeight]

i hope they DON"T redo the charts...i think it should say something that AVERAGE weight is now the higher %ile and how long it has taken to do that etc. i have been paying attention to how much a friends FF baby is weighing. they are only 10 weeks apart. i think her ds is up to 15 lbs and last time i weighed r he was 13 lbs and i'm betting 14 or even 15 now but her ds looks soooo much fatter...like all the fat they are supposed to have is different than r's. r is good and filled out but he is NOT fat where as her ds looks like a fat fat baby.

erica~ i really can't imagine a 12 lb one year old!

jess~ i hope you can wean of quick and stop the itching. it would drive me INSANE. does a pool help? just stand there holding a baby all day hahaha.

dr's~ well its been over 2 months since we went to a dr...i'm not sure what to feel about it. we haven't seen the current one assigned to us and i am not vaxing until...well whenever i decide to make a decision when/if to! but the school season is coming up and i'm sure the kids will be bringing stuff home to battle.

P&H~ ok...well i don't know. i'm not depressed...all the time anyways but i know things aren't going to get better for a long time and generally i just feel like no matter how good i do something or keep my promises or be a good person i am just going to get screwed for a long time. my exh abandons the kids and generally just turns 180 degrees from what i thought. i THOUGHT we were going to have an amicable divorce (3 months) and here we are having lawyers and court trials and still have done NOTHING and we won't have a court date till 1 year after filing! (1.5 years after knowing we are going to get divorced). then r's dad is just a general stressor. knowing i have school coming up with no care for R, having to transfer the kids to new schools as well.

gtg baby is fussing.

[Peace+Hope]

Dhinderliter, sounds like you can't catch a break! I am so sorry things are so rough, but i hope they will look up soon somehow.

Charlie took a 5 1/2 hr nap today. I didn't know what to do with myself!

[andlee]

Hey ladies! I took a huge break from this DDC after DS was born, I don't think I thought it would still exist, or something. My DS is up to 17.2 lbs, a super chunk. I get comments about it all the time and now I'm worried. Do I have the biggest baby possible, or what? Here's a picture of him. My ped didn't seem worried at the 8 week check-up when he was 16lbs., but I am really yet to hear of someone with a fatter baby, and now y'all are giving me a complex. Am I feeding him too much? He's already into the 6-12 month clothes, and is outgrowing some of the 6-9.

[OneWithTwo]

Originally Posted by andlee

Hey ladies! I took a huge break from this DDC after DS was born, I don't think I thought it would still exist, or something. My DS is up to 17.2 lbs, a super chunk. I get comments about it all the time and now I'm worried. Do I have the biggest baby possible, or what? Here's a picture of him. My ped didn't seem worried at the 8 week check-up when he was 16lbs., but I am really yet to hear of someone with a fatter baby, and now y'all are giving me a complex. Am I feeding him too much? He's already into the 6-12 month clothes, and is outgrowing some of the 6-9.

seriously, they told me the average 3 month old is around 17lbs. I talk to more and more new moms in the moms group I am in and they are all around that weight.

[OneWithTwo]

Danielle- she was the cutest ever! The Dr. of course freaked out. Now they are better prepared for J incase he is that small. The Dr. said now they know sis was tiny, if he is, it won't be alarming. She was 100% healthy, just slow weight gain. Plus she had major surgery at 6 months old

[jsh7809]

Originally Posted by ivymae

Yikes - Becky is 3 months and 16.5 lbs, and in the 98th percentile. Average would be the 50th percentile, so I'm thinking someone was pulling stats out of their bum.

Today has been a rollercoaster. I just want one calm, level day! gah! I'm going to look into SAMe - how much are you taking Jess? (I have a herbalist appointment in TWO weeks - gah again!)

Ivy - my herbalist says SAMe works faster (1-2 weeks typically) than SSRIs and with fewer side effects. She encouraged me to try just the SAMe and 5HTP first and see how that goes but I was SO low that I started the Zoloft too. I and she think the SAMe might be what helped since I started feeling better about a week after increasing my SAMe dosage to 400mgs per day. (from 200mgs to start)... I'm also on 50mg Zoloft and now titrating to 25mg for a few days and then nothing. I hope to god that this itching stops soon, it has been 5 days and it's TERRIBLE.
The good news is that I saw a great dr today (my primary care guy, he's a really kind man) and he confirmed that 1-10% of people have itching with Zoloft (whereas my psychiatrist told me to "try lotion", argh), and that he sees a rash, it's just not super obvious. He seconded the titration and discontinuation of the Zoloft and then a possible switch to Paxil (we'll see), and said that if the itching doesn't stop in a few weeks (UGH), he will run a blood panel to rule out things like liver disease, anemia, leukemia (super super rare), thyroid, etc.
I'm pretty optimistic it's the Zoloft, esp after doing some other research online. Such a bummer! But I'm hoping that this will lead me back to just using the hopefully more effective and more natural amino acids in the SAMe. The problem with that is that it's quite expensive, but if it's a better choice and effective, then that would be great.
Ivy, I'd give it a shot, though it's expensive, maybe it can get you up and out of where you are feeling stuck? Hopefully that's what did it for me (as opposed to the Zoloft). And if you can wait a few weeks for it to kick in, then you won't be in the "was it the SSRIs or the SAMe" place I'm in now

Baby weights: don't worry, mamas! I"m guessing you would know instinctively if something was wrong. Everyone grows differently... I have friends with 3 month, 6 month, and 11 month old babies, all at 17 pounds right now. It's kind of funny and fun to see the huge discrepancies in sizes and shapes, but everyone is healthy and happy, so there are no problems there.

Something small and random - I hope - found a tiny smear of blood in S's poop this evening. She seems fine and I"m going to keep watching out - should I be concerned if it doesn't show up again?

[laughingfox]

There is just such a wide range of "normal" with babies. DD1 was a super chunk up to about 6 months, and she was breastfed (she even gained over a pound by her one-week checkup). I have a petite friend whose daughter is about 6 months younger than DD1, but the first time they were together, when DD1 was 3 months and my friend's baby was 9 months, my DD was much bigger, even though her daughter was FF and my daughter was BF.
DD2 is FF now and isn't anywhere near as chunky as DD1 was at this age. Rumor has it that one of my cousins weighed 30 pounds at 6 months.
If your ped isn't worried, I wouldn't be worried.

In other news, I sent off my insurance claim on Tuesday. I'm going to call them Monday and see if they got it. I'm really hoping they pay something. I could really use the money.
I heard there was something in the new health care bill that took effect immediately and required coverage for out-of-hospital birth with midwives, but then I heard it was only for birth-centers and CNMs, not home births and CPMs. I wish I could just find a copy of the darn bill and check it out myself, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

[loveneverfails]

You know what? I actually feel a lot better right now, because I can handle that other people are morons. That people are morons is just something everyone has to deal with sometime or another. Their treatment was unlikely to have caused harm aside from being wildly unnecessary and slightly painful. I can handle that part. If the treatment had been dangerous and unnecessary, I would have raised holy hell, gone to court, whatever I needed to do.

What I can't handle mentally is a child of mine being truly sick and me not seeing it. I need to be able to trust my own judgment, and now I feel like I can. We absolutely got screwed, but it's less frightening to me than the possibility that my child could be truly ill with a serious bacterial infection and me not able to see it, because if that was the case I couldn't trust that I wouldn't miss another bacterial infection.

I feel better knowing that in the end, my judgment and instincts were dead on here and the doctors who refused to listen to me were the problem. Infant with serious edema, iron levels high, improves on dopamine and has x-rays showing vascular congestion from fluid overload = probably some bizarre twin issue but no matter what... it's not a bacterial infection. However, those dolts are not in my life anymore, or my children's lives, so I'm back to relying on my judgment and instincts.

So, backed by the evidence and with the agreement of other medical professionals whose instincts I trust, I can know that I am not someone whose judgment is so questionable that her child could be dying of a bacterial infection and she wouldn't actually know. This isn't how things "should" have been, but I am not the one with questionable judgment, and since I'm the one in charge now, I'm ok with that.

Thank you all for all of your support. I really, really appreciate it.

[smeisnotapirate]

LNF, so glad you're in a better place. I wish the morons you had to deal with hadn't been Mercy's doctors, though. Ugh. What a craptastic situation.

[jsh7809]

Anyone else's baby ever wake up crying in the morning's? S has been doing it more and more and this morning was the worst/ longest. I think it's either gas pains or her starting to realize that a. she's swaddled and can't get to her hands and then (when we unswaddle her) b. she can't control her hands because she's still asleep. But I don't know... what happens is that around 6:30 or 7 she starts crying in her sleep, and we can't get her to stop no matter what we try (boob pinky cuddles shhing unswaddling, reswaddling etc) until she wakes all of the way up on her own. This morning it took like a half hour!! Then once she wakes up, she kind of looks like, "what's happening here?" does her normal happy noises, and falls back to sleep at the breast or sucking on the pinky. Then she sleeps another hour or two squished up against me and when she wakes up for real, she's super happy and cooey and smiley. But that first wake up is such a drag for all of us!
I shouldn't be surrpsied, though, since I have a history of sleepwalking/ talking, I suppose it's only natural that the baby might do something like that too.
In other fun sleeping news, she has gone down somewhat easily the past few nights (not easy, but better than before), and only had one wakeup between 10pm and 6:30am the past three nights! Unless I am sleeping through one of them (which is again highly possible). Then after she gets up, she is ready for her nap in less than an hour and has been somewhat spontaneously falling asleep while playing... which still shocks and amazes me. Everything after that is harder, napwise, but still - signs of improvement! Baby's growing up

I love it when she goes to sleep early enough for me to actually have a chance to miss her, you know?

[nikirj]

Andlee, your baby is adorable

We have a totally chunky baby here too. Let me see if I can link directly to a photo that is on my blog (I'm surprisingly not tech savvy for someone who spends so much time online...):

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EZ_dGZ5cbr.../s1600/035.JPG

There. Big 'ole chunka baby. She is growth spurting for sure - nursing much more often than usual. But she has also started sleeping a solid 7 hour stretch every night, without waking to nurse even. And then waking up, nursing, and going back to sleep for a couple more hours. AWESOME. I will gladly nurse every hour during the day to get that kind of sleep. Also in sleepy news, she pulls sheets over her head, and it seems like she does it on purpose. She'll flail until she grabs one, pull it to her temple, and then fall back asleep.

She is not, BTW, my biggest chunkiest baby, DS was. He could barely move he was so chubby. Once he started getting around on his own he converted it all to muscle and is now a sturdy and big-overall 8yo who is also beneath his weight-for-height (low normal BMI).

LNF, AWESOME. You are a great mom that recognized that your baby was not doing well, and also recognized when she WAS doing well. The moronitude in between is NOT your fault.

This DDC is almost all I do at MDC, although I sometimes find myself clicking elsewhere. I'm not sure my being here is going to outlast the DDC closing.

[Knitting Mama]

I've really become a general poster in "Life With a Babe." It won't be hard for me to make the transition when the DDC closes.

Anyone else have issues with MDC today and Firefox? I had to use the IE tab extension and open the forums in an IE tab instead of the usual Firefox, which sucks because Ad Block Plus doesn't work on IE tabs.

[rhiOrion]

Originally Posted by Cecilia's Mama

I've really become a general poster in "Life With a Babe." It won't be hard for me to make the transition when the DDC closes.

Anyone else have issues with MDC today and Firefox? I had to use the IE tab extension and open the forums in an IE tab instead of the usual Firefox, which sucks because Ad Block Plus doesn't work on IE tabs.

i have. i've found that if i delete the last few hours' worth of history that it works again.

[Knitting Mama]

Yeah, tried that. I still get error messages in regular FF tabs. Oh well, IE tab it is (for now).

[Pepper44]

Wow Niki, that is one big adorable baby!

Ada has fat cheeks and she fits in 6 month clothes, and some 6-9 month things too. She nursed the entire night non-stop last night. Must be a growth spurt. I slept ok through most of it. She is extremely angry today! She fights naps so hard, then she wakes up after 10 or 15 minutes still tired.

Ada has noticed her hands and feet recently. It's so funny to watch her pawing at stuff and staring at her hands trying to figure out how to work them. She also loves to kick stuff while she's sitting on her little potty.

I've been having strange Firefox issues too! Not with MDC yet, but with Flickr and gmail.

Jess--the bloody streak in her poop...I wouldn't worry unless it keeps happening and/or mucus starts accompanying it. I think it can be a sign of dairy allergy? Or if your nipples were irritated from pumping maybe she ingested a little blood?