The Rundown

So. Here we go.

In mid-November Dylan had diarrhea for about a week. It cleared up while we were in California, but she still didn't sleep well, apparently because of some digestive upset. I thought it was mostly because of the travel, and when we went out of town for Thanksgiving the next I still thought that was a part of it. I also thought maybe my efforts to help with the diarrhea had wound up making her constipated. It took a good three or four weeks to realize that even with sleeping in her own bed and eating a good amount of fiber she was still waking up every single night with what seemed to be painful gas.

On a given night where this happens she goes to bed okay, then wakes up crying anywhere from 45 minutes to 5 hours later. She is usually still tired and clearly wants to be sleeping, but the gas is so uncomfortable she just can't stay asleep. Sometimes one of us stands there rubbing her back for two hours, thinking just a few more minutes will do it. A few nights ago she went and grabbed her crib and asked for more more more. Sometimes it is so painful she wakes up screaming and keeps screaming for an hour. We always try to help keep her asleep, but usually at some point she really wakes up, and once that happens it almost always takes a couple hours before she can get back down. Bear in mind those couple hours are, for example, 2 to 4 in the morning. On bad nights she wakes up two or three times, then is up for good at 6am. Her cheeks also get alarmingly red during the worst of the gas.

This happened more or less every single night from mid-November though mid-December. Over that time I completely eliminated dairy from her diet, thinking that was the problem. She had a couple good nights (=11-12 hours uninterrupted sleep) and we had some hope that she was getting better. My theory was that the dairy had been hard on her system as it tried to recover from the diarrhea. When I took her in for her 15-month well child visit her pediatrician did some tests for allergies, which all came back negative.

Then we started traveling over the holidays and she had no more good nights of any kind, and actually seemed to be getting worse. By this time we were all completely exhausted, and I will tell you nothing is more pathetic than a sleep-deprived baby. She has several extra folds of skin under her eyes from being so tired and they keep getting infected. I started thinking it must be some kind of food intolerance triggered by the diarrhea and did a lot of reading about that kind of thing. I played around with her diet a little more to try to figure out what it was, but I was worried about her nutrition and didn't want to mess with it too dramatically for very long. In a way it was nice for our families to see what we're dealing with because it is sort of hard to describe why "painful gas" is affecting our lives so dramatically.

Last week I realized that the dairy-free Fig Newmans and Newman O's (which are really good, by the way) that I was so proud of discovering had rice flour in them. Dylan has always been very sensitive to rice (which no one ever believes when I tell them because rice is supposed to be a classically hypoallergenic food), which causes her to wake up screaming from gas with bright red cheeks. Whoops.

We were able to see an allergist last week, and he ran some more tests for allergies and infections. We won't have those results for a while, and if they are negative ("Well apparently in the medicine community, negative means good.") I haven't quite decided what to do next. The doctors have been helpful, but ultimately it feels like it is up to me to figure things out. It has now been 8 weeks since this started and I still have no idea what is going on. My best guess right now is a lingering infection, maybe giardia.

Since we came back home last Thursday (and, um, cut the known allergen out of her diet) she may be getting better. She has had a couple great nights and one okay one, but none that have been really bad. I'm going to start blogging, and maybe even exercising, again, and Aaron is going to start doing whatever it is that he does while I'm blogging and exercising. Sorry I stopped writing, I was just having a hard time even squeezing in a good tooth brushing between rubbing Dylan's back and wringing my hands in despair. Wish us luck.