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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Runny nose = no eating


Kaitlyn has had a cold now for a week. Luckily, it never progressed into her lungs this time around. BUT it made her have a very runny nose and she REFUSED to eat!

She's been on an inhaled steroid now for about 2 months, and I'm hoping that this really helped keep the mucous out of her lungs. Yeah.

It was like before, all her behaviour came back, where she hadn't refused to eat even one time since feeding therapy began.

We stopped all oral feedings, as we couldn't allow her to "learn" that it was ok to refuse the food. It's likely that she had a sore throat from all the runny snot.

Whenever she's gotten sick in the past, her vomiting increased. This time a funny thing happened, when we switched back over to her Blended Diet (BD) her vomiting stopped. And (if you read the last posts) she's been vomiting a WHOLE lot lately. Of 4 days with solely BD, she vomited 2 times. That's really quite good. I haven't had a slow down in vomit for months now.

My fear was when we started to try to feed her orally again, which we tried today, it went actually quite well, but we were only on a small amount of oral food. Tomorrow we will up it to 1/2 and 1/2 BD to see how she does.
The picture above is a really nice vomit that surprised me after giving Kaitlyn a bath one night. It was so huge, and the spray pattern so big it caused a bit of a mess. I was holding naked K and she vomited right at the entry to her room, so needless to say, clean up was a bit nasty. When I called Brian later that night (he was at work), I told him that I was cleaning vomit out of the fan (yes you can see the fan in the picture). thank goodness the fan wasn't on, he was chuckling when I first told him I was cleaning vomit out of the fan, as he pictured K vomiting with the fan on and vomit going everywhere.
Do you feel sorry for me yet? :)
I watched some tv program (Dirty Jobs) the other day and the episode was called "Vomit Island" I just had to watch it!

7 comments:

Laura said...

yuck!
i feel your pain.
we love that show here under the big top. it is a great way to gross out the teenagers. i hope your sweet girl feels better and gets back on track with oral eating again soon.

dcj said...

Holy cow!!!!

You get points for being able to clean that mess up. I wouldn't have been able to. I'm the kind of person that cannot handle vomit - not at all. I'm the person who will puke at the sight of it.

Emily said...

As usual, I can relate. Check out my post called "You know you need a vacation when...". Any idea why the oral feeds cause more vomit?

Mama Ali said...

You have got to admit that looking back on it if the fan had been on that would have been a little funny (looking back on it/ not in the moment of course). But seriously, I hope she feels better soon and that the time off from solid food feeding will do her some good.

Kristina said...

I'm so sorry your little one is sick. Anastasia is getting over a cold, too, and she's still not eating much. (She refused all food and nearly all liquid while sick.) That's hard on ALL moms, but particularly moms of babies/toddlers who have eating issues!

Hugs,
Kristina

skeybunny said...

I think you should call up Mike Rowe to come do a "Dirty Job" story on you personally. You have your own little vomit island going on. (I saw that story, and was a little let down because the bird "vomit" was just a bunch of whole dead fish--I was expecting a little more in the gross-ness department). I guess you could make the argument that the BD looks about the same coming back out as it does going in--but I still feel sorry for you. Just to commisserate a little, I was venting Evan's tube today and he grabbed the syringe and dumped out some of the contents without me seeing it. Much later on, I was stroking his hair and discovered said stomach contents. Lovely.

Hugs,
Sarah (mom to Evan, 2 yrs, CHARGE Syndrome, S/P G-tube & Nissen)

BusyLizzyMom said...

Liz,
Elizabeth also barfs after bath's and swimming, I think she gets a chill and woof out it comes. Thankfully your fan wasn't on as that would have been even worse, poor kid but poor mommy who has to clean it up.
Elizabeth barfed down the floor vent (Daddy aimed her wrong) and we ended up with a bad case of ants as the barf was so far down the vent.
These are days in which I really should have stayed in my bed and hid under the covers.
I hope feeding is going better for Kaitlyn and she is beginning to get the concept of chewing, it must be so foreign for her.