Last updated on September 30th, 2021 at 10:18 am
It is hard to remember back to when our now 15-month-old twins first came home from the hospital. Not because of sleep deprivation but because I have tried to block out how awful that particular time period was for us. That may sound harsh, I know. But, our twins spent the first 6 weeks at home screaming their identical heads off pretty much every second that they were awake. Why? Two words – acid reflux.
I had always thought acid reflux in infants caused a lot of vomiting and spitting up. Our twins didn’t spit up very much and certainly not in a frequency or amount that would have me thinking about acid reflux. At first, we thought it was colic and gave them gripe water, and then gas drops. That helped some, but not much. In desperate need of relief, we made the first of many trips to the pediatrician.
Our pediatrician is absolutely fantastic and I trust everything she tells me. Dr. T suggested perhaps they were allergic to dairy, and so I stopped breastfeeding them for a week and we gave them a hypoallergenic formula. I think that made it worse. Have you ever smelled that awful formula? Our poor babies were miserable and so were we.
After a week, we determined it wasn’t an allergy. We went back to breast milk. The pediatrician diagnosed our babies with silent reflux. She asked us if they had been smacking their lips a lot and crying after they ate. I answered yes to both questions. She told me that sometimes severe reflux babies (all babies have reflux to some degree) swallow the acids and food that they might otherwise vomit up. It still hurts just as bad, they just don’t go through quite as many outfits.
Our pediatrician prescribed Zantac and Enfamil AR which has rice added to the formula. The boys took Zantac three times a day, had breast milk during the day and formula at night. The thing about Zantac is that it is very weight specific and stops working pretty quickly. Our boys lasted three days. During that time there was one night I will never, ever forget.
The twins had been crying pretty much all day with nothing calming them down. My mom and I had tried everything we could think of. In complete desperation, I strapped one baby into his car seat and wore the other one and went out into the cool night air on my back porch. This is where my husband found me 30 minutes later, swinging the boys back and forth like a crazed person. I was afraid to stop.
Back to the pediatrician we went. This time I demanded something stronger from another pediatrician in the practice. We were prescribed Prevacid. Prevacid does not come in a liquid form and so we had to go to a compounding pharmacy and have it made into a liquid. We also started having the twins sleep in their carseats which were even more upright! This was the solution that finally worked for us. The boys stayed on Prevacid and Enfamil AR until they were six months old. Then, they were sitting up and eating baby food which helped keep their reflux at bay.
From this entire ordeal I learned a few things about acid reflux that you may find useful.
- Breastmilk has natural antacids. The boys always seemed to be okay with breastmilk but their nighttime formula was another story.
- The nice reps at Enfamil will send you cases of formula of any kind including the hypoallergenic kind if your doctor tells their rep to do so. We got two full cases.
- The pediatrician’s office also has tons of sample cans of the expensive formulas. Ask for it. Our pediatrician gave us at least three or four cans every time we came in.
Two babies with reflux are enough to send a mommy and a daddy over the edge. I am so glad that I had a pediatrician that worked with us and that we were able to find relief with a stronger medicine. Reflux isn’t always visible in the form of vomit so being aware of the nuances of what happens after your baby eats can help you and your doctor figure out what is going on.
Jeannette Toscano is mom to identical twins Aaron and Benjamin and big sister Emma. Realizing that raising three children under the age of four is a full time job, she recently left her job in public relations to stay home with her children. Writing about life, being a mom and raising kids keep her sane.
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