Cautious Optimism

I've been so terrified to say anything for fear of jinxing but here I go... It's been several nights now of sleeping with a medicated baby and so far it is blissful. B does not scream or writhe in pain, and he wakes up less than half the number of times he used to. Not only that, but when he wakes up, it lasts 3 minutes while he finds me, nurses, and drifts off to sleep. There is no agony, no picking him up, no rocking, no pacing the halls for 30 minutes. 

I am trying to focus on the selfish aspects of this and how much better I feel so that I can ignore the guilt. How long was my baby in pain while I sat here and bitched about what a bad sleeper he is?? How did I not notice this?? I don't think he's had this since birth since he used to sleep well ok. The world needs more PSAs on the topic, obviously, because I consider myself compulsively well read on everything baby and I had never heard of Silent Reflux. Reflux? Yes. But Silent Reflux? No!

The word Silent does not refer to the patient's lack of screaming, clearly, but instead to their lack of puking. The standard refluxers projectile vomit all the time and are thus fairly straightforward to diagnose. Being such a fat kid, however, B is loathe to let a single calorie escape his system so he almost never pukes. Instead the acid comes back up from his stomach, sears his throat, he gulps and makes a burping sound (turns out maybe he does not have bad gas!!) and the acid washes back down- burning once more.

All this time I thought B had a bad temper, although strangely he only had a temper about food (should have been a clue perhaps). Sometimes when nursing or eating real food, he would all of a sudden arch his back, scream, and paw the food or the boob away. I thought this was a dramatic display of either not wanting the food anymore or wanting it to come more quickly. I wondered how he could be so good natured 95% of the time and a spitfire pain in the butt when eating. I should not even be allowed to care for a puppy. He was not throwing a tantrum, he was IN PAIN.

"I won't remember any of this, but the scars on my subconscious will never fade."

For now I'm just hoping that the relief continues for him and that this series of good nights is not a fluke. I also hope that he doesn't remember any of this so he can never hold against me how long it took to figure it out. When he seeks therapy one day, I will remind him that I at least held him in my sleepy arms while I silently cursed him for being a bad sleeper rather than leaving him in his room to scream alone as the acid burned off layers of his throat.

To harp on the jinxing point further, I am completely terrified that this is all a trick and we have not in fact found the diagnosis. Regardless, I am already riddled with guilt and feelings of stupidity at the prospect of his issues being medically related, so if indeed he regresses or these nights turn out to be flukes, it could not get much worse in the feeling-like-the-worst-mom-in-the-world sense. It would only be worse in the whole baby-suffering, no-one-sleeping, walking-through-life-as-a-completely-unconscious-zombie sense.

The discovery of this photo from 1977 is encouraging as it seems my brother was able to survive some questionable parenting.