June
2008
Sweat, Pukies and Belly boogers
A pleasant title, no? But that is what we’ve been dealing with this weekend.
The heat wave that was rolling over the country finally reached us on Saturday and it’s been a sauna since. And it’s not even 90 here yet (according to the car). The AC is already having trouble keeping up with the heat generated by all of Dorrie’s equipment, and I shudder to think what late July and August are going to be like. For her part, Dorrie has been spending her day in the buff, and yesterday I bought a cooling pad which we can place in her bed to keep her back from getting overheated. No such luck for mom and dad, though.
On Friday, we switched over to NeoCate for Dorrie’s food. NeoCate is an amino acid based formula, meaning that it’s supposed to be even easier to digest than breastmilk and is hypoallergenic so it shouldn’t cause any kind of inflammatory reaction in the gut. Except that she’s been puking at nearly every feed, and we don’t know if it’s just because of the heat or because she doesn’t tolerate the NeoCate or because she needs a little longer to get used to it. We are going to try adding a bit more SimplyThick to it (the formula is much thinner than breastmilk) to see if that helps, but if she won’t keep it down, I’m just not sure what we’re going to do.
And to top it off the area around her G-Tube has been making belly boogers again. This is discharge and goo that comes out of the stoma and then dries around below the plastic tube and irritates her skin. It’s quite unpleasant and we’re not sure if that might not be contributing to the puking also. We’ve pulled out the bacitracin again to try and see if a bit of antibiotic might help matters.
In other news, the nurse did not bother to show up or call on Friday, nor did she actually contact the nursing agency as far as we know. So we aren’t sure what’s up with that. Especially interesting is that Dr. Optimist came on Friday again and naturally asked where the nurse was, so I told her. I’m not sure anything will come of that (more likely she will get in trouble as the agency knows she didn’t show — Bob called to find out if she had called in sick) but I am finding having the nurse here during the day gets more and more on my nerves as time goes on.
Hello - I’m a nutritionist for the company that makes Neocate and might be able to help. However, since there could be several reasons for the intolerance, first I would need to get some additional information about Dorrie. If you’d like to talk, please call 1-800-Neocate and ask to speak with me - Sarah.