Saturday, May 9, 2009

Weathering the Storm

Lydia had her 2-month immunizations yesterday, and they have made her miserable. She has thrown up three times (twice yesterday, once today, and twice in great quantities all over Robin) and had huge diarrhea diapers twice (once yesterday, once today, and once in great quantities all over me.) This of course led us to be concerned about dehydration, so we called the on-call line for our doctor. 

This is really the first time that Lydia has been sick. She had a low-grade temperature after her Hepatitis B vaccine, but no symptoms other than fussiness. So when we decided to call the doctor after the third vomit episode, I was pretty upset. I was put through to a nurse who works for another doctor in our pediatrician's group. 

The nurse gave us what seemed like very extreme directions. She told me to stop nursing Lydia until tomorrow so that my breastmilk wouldn't make her throw up. Instead of breastmilk to hydrate her, she told us to give Lydia 1 teaspoon of Pedialyte every 5 minutes for an hour. Then she said to give her 2 teaspoons of Pedialyte every 5 minutes for the second hour, and 3 teaspoons every 10 minutes for the third hour. I swear, she wanted us to give Lydia her body weight in Pedialyte. This really made me panicky, because I felt like if we were supposed to be doing these 

I hung up and felt really uncomfortable with these suggestions, especially with not nursing her just because she had thrown up (remember, only one of the three times was today.) So I called back and was put through to a doctor. He basically said keep feeding her, and she'll be fine. His advice couldn't have been more different from the nurse's. He didn't say anything about Pedialyte, and he wanted me to keep nursing her. 

We have kept giving her breastmilk, but from a bottle so we can see how much she is taking in.  No Pedialyte. No water. We're still giving her Infant Tylenol to make sure her temperature doesn't spike, but she seems to be doing fine; hopefully we are on the home stretch. I am going to talk to our pediatrician to see if there is anything we can do to avoid this when her four-month immunizations come around. When all is said and done, Robin and I will be able to say that we survived the first time our baby was sick.  

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