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Sunday, July 5, 2009

Barfing baby

Thursday night, Mira went to bed at her normal time (9pm) but then she woke up at 10pm. When I went in to pick her up, everything was all wet. When I turned on the light to figure out what was going on, I discovered that she had thrown up everywhere. I called Brian in to help and while he was changing the crib sheets, I cleaned up Mira and changed her. Just as I was putting her to the breast to nurse back to sleep, she threw up again. All over me and her and the chair and everywhere. Poor baby. These weren't little spit ups, like burp and a little white stuff comes up behind it and then giggle. No, these were whole body wracking heaving, more liquid erupting from my baby than I even thought she could hold, and then cry cry crying afterward. I felt so helpless. All I could do was hold her and comfort her. After an hour and a half of repeated vomiting, I had changed both her clothing and mine no less than four times, and I had a huge pile of dirty linens as I had grabbed any cloth I could get my hands on to try to catch the mess. When she finally stopped, she went back to sleep really quickly, only nursing a tiny bit before nodding off. She woke up at 3am, and had thrown up again, though I had put cloth diapers under her so that I didn't have to change the sheets again. Again she went back to sleep really quickly without eating much. When she woke again at 6am, she was hungry and nursed both sides before falling back to sleep. She slept till 9am on Friday morning when she woke up refreshed and acting as though nothing had happened. But then all day Friday, she refused any foods other than milk, so her stomach may have still been a bit sensitive. But other than that, she was her normal happy self. So that is the sickest she has ever been to date. I'm just glad she got over it so fast.

1 comment:

Marcy said...

Poor thing! Donovan has had tummy issues a couple of times, and it's heartwrenching each time. Just feel so bad for them.

Glad to hear that's over with, and seeing as it's now Monday I'm guessing you escaped then having issues with things exploding out the other end (seems to be common after throwing up problems). So you don't need this advice anymore, but here's what the nurses had me do when Donovan was sick and figure it's good to know for next time:

1. No food or liquids of any kind while they're still throwing up. Not even nursing. Their tummies are too upset to keep anything down at that point.
2. Once they've gone a full hour without throwing up, give 1 tsp of liquid (water, pedialite, or breastmilk) every 10-20 minutes, I think. If they keep that down, keep giving the 1tsp/10-20mins for at least 1 hour. If they've kept it all down for that whole hour, then it's ok to go back to normal feeding routines. You don't have to keep them up for that time to keep giving them fluids, the point is to give their stomach time to settle down before giving it more to deal with. Which, really, is also great advice for anytime ANYONE (baby or grown) has a stomach bug and is throwing up...

I'm keeping that advice handy for whenever we may need it again... it's what the nurses told me to do when I called the advice line. Hopefully neither of us needs to use it again for a while though!