We got our happy ending!

by Caz Sands
(Honolulu, HI USA)

Our 4th baby, Isabella, had very severe reflux around 2 months old. All the symptoms you all experience, the back arching, grunting, vomiting, choking, hiccups, burps, crying all day, not sleeping, etc etc.

We only knew it was reflux after one morning she had what we thought was a seizure and raced her to hospital, only to have her pediatrician call me on the way and say she thinks it was something called Sandifers Syndrome and not an actual seizure, and she was right.

Sandifers is a seizure-like response to severe reflux. After still seeing she wasn’t getting relief after starting Omeprazole that her GI doc prescribed, I turned to this page and started Marci dosing and compounding the med myself using TC Max.

I kept waiting for the magical day a lot of the moms experience when baby suddenly turns a corner, but I didn’t really experience that. In fact it seemed like our acid battle just kept on going, on and on for months. Part of that was my fault, I was afraid to give her the high dose that was being recommended, and did a gradual increase.

We did start to see symptoms resolve, but the last few symptoms of congestion, hiccups and not sleeping well just wouldn’t go away. In fact she would only sleep in a swing for the first 6 months of her life.

I had zero idea how I would ever get her into the crib to sleep. But as she was gradually getting better she was getting too big for the swing and I just had to get her in that crib. One day we did it cold turkey. She didn’t do as badly as I thought and we stuck with it. She would still wake up a LOT but she would take naps in it and do ok enough.

We had to dose her at 40% over. I would say it took another month until I realized one day that she had NO more symptoms at all! And she was SO happy!

It wasn’t a magical change one night, it was a gradual change. One of the very last things to change was her sleep. I was looking into sleep training, crying it out, etc etc. But nothing was working. Then all of a sudden one day she just slept through the night! My husband and I were shocked. She had been waking up 4-5 times after going down for the night and that was just before midnight! It seemed she was finally able to sleep better.

I checked into heysleepybaby on Instagram suggested by someone on this page to see if I could get away from all the rocking when putting her to sleep. Her tricks worked, to the point where now I lay her down in her crib with a few pacifiers, walk out and she puts herself to sleep. No more hours of rocking! She takes 2 x 1.5-2 hour naps every day, and only wakes up 1-2 times sometimes, or sleeps through. This is a miracle compared to where we were in the early days!

Today she is 9 months old. Isabella is SUCH a happy girl! She laughs and talks and is trying to walk, she is a joy to be around! No more symptoms whatsoever and we haven’t had to increase the dose in ages, I’m about to start slowly weaning her. Isabella also has major congenital heart defects and is having surgery next month to repair them. But giving her this high dose of medicine hasn’t affected her heart or magnesium levels. :)