I remember taking this picture so clearly. Max and I had just been at Mommy and Me Yoga and we lasted about 15 minutes because he was crying through the whole thing. I tried nursing him, rocking him, rubbing his little back - it all made him cry harder. That was during Hanukkah of 2010. I was still on maternity leave. He had started crying non-stop the night before. We left yoga and stopped at the post office on the way home so that I could send a package of a few early hand me downs to my girlfriend in France who was expecting a little boy. She was so worried that her little boy might come early and she wouldn't have clothes for him so I put together a little package of a few things that Maxie had already outgrown. He was less than two months old here. I took this photo in the post office and then I posted it on Facebook and just wrote "Acid Reflux :( " on the post. I got about 20 responses from parents who had had to endure infant reflux. Max was miserable. It sucked. That night JNFuture (our young leadership group at JNF) had their Hanukkah party at the Comedy Store and it was one of the first outings without Max that Ted and I went on after Max was born. We came home and never went to sleep that night. My dad's family came over the next night to celebrate Hanukkah with us and Ted and I must have looked like the living dead. We definitely felt like it. Max spent the next 3 days and nights wailing all day and all night long. On day 2, I joined him. We both just cried and cried. I remember my step mother calling one day and I just cried through the whole conversation. There was nothing to do really until I could get to his pediatrician. Our friend Missy had suggested at the JNFuture party that we ask for Zantac, which her little boy was on when he had infant reflux. I asked for it. The crying stopped. (The pediatrician wasn't going to give it to me but I sort of insisted). I also stopped eating dairy for about 5-6 months because several mommies had suggested that a dairy intolerance might be causing the reflux. During that time, Ted and I discovered the joys of overpriced Almond ice milk "ice cream", which was actually delicious. I also ate a lot of imitation sour cream and cream cheese and put almond milk in my cereal and coffee. Yum. This was the one real rough patch we had with Max. I had acid reflux in my third trimester with Max. It sucked. Bad. It broke my heart thinking about his teeny tiny little body and him having to deal with acid shooting up his teeny tiny little esophagus. Poor baby. The medicine did the trick though. After about a day of the Zantac and every day after that, we had a very happy baby.
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Found your blog through DS. I also keep one about the loss of my son at www.lifeaftersids.blogspot.com I wanted to comment on this entry because my first son had severe acid reflux. It went undiagnosed. I KNOW it was acid reflux because I've since had two other babies that had it and they WERE diagnosed with it and had the exact same symptoms. Anyway, I thought we were going to go out of our minds. My son started screaming from nearly the minute he was born until he was about a year old. He didn't sleep for more than an hour and a half at a time until he was six months old. It was horrible. Friends and family made it sound like it was our fault. They said we spoiled him. He threw up all the time, though, and we knew something was wrong. We tried all kinds of remedies and, of course, nothing worked. The doctor just shrugged.
With our second one (the one that died from SIDS) the non-stop crying started about 2 weeks into his life. I wasn't going to go through that again. I took him to a new doc who heard the crying himself, patted me on the back, apologized, and gave him Zantac. Worked immediately.
When he died my original thought was that he had somehow choked on the acid reflux. That was ruled out, though.
I am very sorry for your loss, I am happened upon this site when searching for info on Doc bands. Your Son Maxie, was an amazing little guy. I must ask, was reflux ruled out for a possible cause of why Maxie stopped breathing? My 5 month old has reflux, SIDS of course is and will always be a huge worry for me, but I worry so much with the reflux as he tends to choke sometimes on the acid coming up.
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