6month old with reflux and hyperactive gag reflex

pecas24

Okay so this is my first time post please excuse me. But my daughter is now 6months old and throws up atleast once a day! We've had a really rough start, I had preeclampsia while pregnant, and so she was born at 35wks. Since her two wk checkup we have battling acid reflux, which Sofia's peditrician says will cause the vomiting/projectile vomiting. We just recently switched her formula to similac alumentium, its super exspensive but the Dr told me to try it and see if it helps and if not we will do tests on her GI. So besides all of that, since almost the beginning ive noticed she has a hyperactive gag reflex. My lil sofia will gag her self on anything, toys, pacifier, her hands, bottle, food etc. But now it's to the point where so throws up! Any suggestions? I'm a first time mom and all my husband tells me is she's fine she'll grow out of it! SMH

witt0198

Ugh, feeding difficulties are so tough. Brief back drop; we've been around the block and back again with Evan and feeding difficulties, everything from reflux/vomiting to the point of FTT and oral aversion, sensitive gag, g-tube, food intollerances, back to eating normally and no feeding tube.

Evan's OT suggested doing "tongue walking" excercises with Evan for his gag reflex. Basically you put gentle pressure with your finger in a bump to the tip of the tongue, do that for awhile, when that's tolerated well, you do the tip, then back just a little bit, eventually the goal being to do three quick bumps in a row at the tip, middle and back of tongue. Honestly, with Evan it just made him worse so we stopped pretty quickly. The biggest thing we did that helped was just switch bottles to one that had a shorter nipple. The breast flow by the first years has a really short nipple.

Uh oh, he's up crying from his nap, try to get back soon

witt0198

Ok, sorry,

My previous post was just about the sensitive gag reflex. FWIW, Evan still has a more sensitive gag than his peers to this day. At this point I've accepted it as part of who he is.

When it comes to the reflux, The thing that helped evan the most in the end was figuring out what was in his diet that was agrivating him. It took us 1 1/2 yrs because one of the things is in almost everything, including the hypoallergenic formulas; corn syrup products, and too much pasteurized dairy fats. Pregestimil was the formula that ended up working for him, he had BM before that as it was the least bad of the things we tried. Pregestimil tastes pretty bad though, so he never drank it by mouth, we could only give it to him through his feeding tube.

Other things that helped, pacing his eating with frequent burpings, elevating the head of his bed, being careful not to put pressure on the left side of his belly, he couldn't tolerate any floor time (our case was extreme, I don't expect you to have to keep your daughter from the floor entirely), we couldn't bounce and play etc.

Some people have really good results with medications. Evan would improve for about 1wk, then we saw no effect, he wasn't in pain, so we didn't keep him on them. However, his doctors didn't increase the dose for him as I've learned many other kiddo's docs did, so that may have been the problem, I don't know.

 If alimentum doesn't work, nestle's good start is worth a try (it's 100% whey protien, and no corn sryup products), then neocate/elecare is usually next and very expensive.

GL!

pecas24

Thanks, when we first started her on formula we had her on the nestle goodstart, and had the same results. And just recently our doctor had us try Alumentium, but it only thinned out the vomit. So he said to stop with that because it is kind of exspense, and his goal was to have the vomiting stop completely.