I was hoping our next post would be something exciting, something nice....something "normal"!! Kaitlyn has had increased secretions for the past week and a half almost two weeks. It started out like a head cold. Increased secretions were almost entirely from the nose. She has had no fever and has not been bi-pap dependant. Her spirits have been good and she has been acting normal, just extra junky.
Well yesterday it finally happened, she stopped digesting her feeds! Friday Kaitlyn was fine, digesting fine and acting fine except for the increased secretions. Then yesterday morning I gave Kaitlyn her first morning bolus and no issues. Then I fed her again and when I went to feed her a third time she still had all of her last feed in her stomach! I knew right away what was happening! Everytime Kaitlyn gets sick now it stops or severely slows her digestion. It seems as time goes on that it is taking less and less provocation for her tummy to shut down :(
The first thing I always do when digestion slows is I take her formula back to a base mix. Kaitlyn's normal formula contains fruit juice, fruits, supplements and her powdered formula. When she is sick and is digesting poorly we take out all of her fruit juice and fruits. We then add extra pedialyte and this usually helps her food move through her system better. So yesterday I remixed Kaitlyn's food and fed that to her. She still wasn't digesting!!! After we put Kaitlyn to bed Tim went out to get more pedialyte and we gave her straight pedialyte.....finally!! The pedialyte started moving through her. At this point she was pretty dry.
We then gave her pedialyte and mixed in some of her bland formula. This seemed to work! Hopefully we can keep her gut working in the right direction. Thanks to the suggestions from some of the other SMA families I have a couple of things I can try if she stops digesting again!
Her cold does seem to be getting a little worse, but she is not presenting any differently than the rest of us. We'll see how she does over the next day and decide whether or not to take her and have some cultures done. She is nowhere's near needing to be admitted unless she needs fluids!
