Tuesday, July 10, 2012

zantac and pepcid and prevacid......OH CRY!!!!!!

My blog has taken a serious hit of the lazies lately and it is completely and 100% due to the fact that life has been pretty overwhelming since adding Wesley to our brood!  He was born under stressful circumstances and it continued being very stressful until about a month ago.  When he was about 3 weeks old I started to come out of the newborn fog and realized that all his crying and fussing was not normal.  He just didn't act like a normal newborn.  He wouldn't sleep ever, was always fussing and was a stiff as a board.  He would often arch his back.  His cry just wasn't anything I had heard before in my other children as newborns.  So, I turned to the internet.  The other symptoms seemed a lot like reflux to me but there was never any spit up.  After reading a lot, I found that silent reflux is a real thing.  Then I talked to Krista (my sil) and she said two of her boys also had silent reflux.  I made an appointment for Wesley and his pediatrician agreed with me and started him on Zantac.  When I told my friends that he was put on Zantac, they all said ask for Prevacid.  None of them had had any success with Zantac but this was my pediatricians process for fixing reflux.  After a week of being on it, there was no change at all.  If anything, things seemed worse to me but that may have been because I was expecting this huge change and then nothing happened at all.  It was devastating to me.  Now, that may sound a bit dramatic but I have this now 1 month old baby that I have not really bonded with at all.  I love him, of course, because he is mine but I wasn't exactly liking him or enjoying him at all.  So I called the doc and he started him on Pepcid  - his second course of action.  Again, I go get it filled with all the expectations I had before - thinking it was going to be a miracle drug.  Uh, negatory!  No miracle, no change, no nothing.  At this point, my doc referred us to a pediatric GI specialist down at Hopkins.  WORST EXPERIENCE EVER.  The doctor basically got so hung up on my medical history that he chalked up all Wesley's problems to my medicine coming through his milk. After telling this doctor several times that this is the third baby I have nursed, he still wasn't listening and I was getting livid.  He started writing out orders to put in a catheter that day to collect a urine sample, taking blood, and doing some 72 hour acid test.  That's when I lost it.  I kindly, but firmly, told the doctor there was no way on God's green planet I was going to do all these extreme tests before we exhausted all the non-invasive tests like trying, oh I don't know, PREVACID.  So he gave me a therapeutic dose (a one week dose that he speculated wouldn't work anyway because something was terribly wrong with my baby and he wanted to say "I told you so?") and sent me on my way.  Not kidding, after two doses of Prevacid, Wesley was a whole different child.  He was smiley and cooing.  He was pleasant and playing.  More importantly, he started sleeping during the day like a normal baby!  It was heaven and I was finally starting to enjoy this sweet baby that I had anticipated for so long.  So, the moral of the story is that Prevacid is a miracle drug - my opinion is go straight to the good stuff!!!  

2 comments:

Nate and Lori said...

Reese had acid reflux and it is definitely hard. We never tried Prevacid, but I will keep that in mind for future babies. I hate when Drs get hung up on things and then wont listen to you. I had a UTI once and the Dr is insiting that I need to have all these tests run for Diabetes and all sorts of other things. She was so worried because I had blood in my urine but I kept telling her that I had just had a baby a few weeks beforehand so thats why. Nope. Ended up having the tests done anyways and of course, nothing was wrong and it was a UTI.

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