An update

A few of you have asked for updates on Max and our nursing situation. Ummm, let's just say I'm not being such an obedient mama anymore. Honestly, a few days of bottle feeding was about enough to send me to the proverbial padded room. He hated it. With a passion. With a scream-for-twenty-or-thirty-minutes-and-then-take-forever-to-drink-it passion. The kind where when he woke up at night, instead of me just rolling over and feeding him and us both falling quikcly back to sleep, he would take an hour to drink the bottle, then stay up for another hour because he woke himself up so thoroughly while eating. It wasn't pretty.

So what to do? We followed our insitincts, gave Max a priesthood blessing, and we're now back to nursing full time. And we have a much happier baby, and a much happier mama. And, he really is doing much better. The choking seems to have lessened somewhat and he's much more settled at the breast.

We made another trip into Primary Children's last week, this time to meet with the ENT team. They were supposed to be looking for structural defects, such as a hidden cleft palate, or a laryngeal cleft. We didn't find any of those, but what we did find after they put a tube with a camera up his nose (and yes, that's about as pleasant as it sounds) is that he has severe reflux. He almost never spits up, but it seems to be coming up into his throat and then going back down again. His throat, esophagus, larynx, etc are all raw and swollen from the reflux. What this new Doctor believes is that there has been so much damage from the reflux that everything is numb, complicating the process involved in swallowing, which is likely resulting in the aspiration. So, he put him on a much stronger reflux med, and we go back in three weeks for amore in depth swallow study. Its actually great news, because if the next study shows improvement, we can likely be back to breastfeeding as normal and have the doctors on board as well.

Although, this doctor is my favorite so far. He was the first to admit that pumping and bottlefeeding was an obnoxious timewaster, and told me that he thought nursing would be fine if Max was calm, since that seemed to reduce the choking and aspiration. So there you go. At least one doctor somewhat on our side.