Jennifer: What Colic's Really Like
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Wondertime's interview with Jennifer, mom of twin girls Riley and Sydney, (all shown left) who were 10 weeks old at the time.
Wondertime: How old were your girls when they started acting colicky?
Probably about 1 month is when they started getting real fussy, and we couldn't figure out what was going on.
Wondertime: Did they start at the same time?
Within a day or two of each other, they sure did.
Wondertime: And what did you do?
Called the doctor constantly. We tried so many different things. Both girls are on breast milk, so of course we played the game where, well, maybe we need to give them more, so we're going to fortify with a little bit of formula. That didn't work. And then we tried a little bit of cereal in the bottle, and that didn't work. We tried, maybe they're allergic to something, so we switched off breast milk to pure formula. That didn't work. We just played the whole game of "Let's try everything humanly possible to figure out what's going to make these babies happy." Of course nothing ever did.
Wondertime: What were your experiences with their doctors like during all this? For example, I spoke to one mom who said it really helps if their doctor has had colicky children of his or her own.
True. I would say that's very true. I mean, I like my pediatrician a lot, but we pretty much hit a brick wall. It was all, "They'll grow out of this. You're just going to have to kind of live with it. Walk them. Drive them around in the car." It really is very difficult to get an answer as to why it's happening, what you can do about it. And unfortunately my pediatrician is very conservative when it comes to trying to medicate for things like reflux, so they felt like that was a last, last, last resort. Pretty much they wanted me to live with it as long as I could.
And finally we were able to convince them to try some reflux medicine, which ended up not working out anyway, and that put us in Dr. Vartabedian's hands. It was probably a good month and a half of going back and forth to the pediatrician. Does she have a stomach virus? Does she have colic, quote-unquote? What's going on? Weekends of vomiting, going to the emergency room and them saying, "There's nothing wrong with her, she probably just has a 24-hour bug." None of these things were really what was happening, and nothing really helped.
It was very frustrating to go through it, especially as a first-time parent. Not knowing what's normal, what's not normal, and to have people tell you, "This is normal." I'm sorry, if your child is screaming out in pain, that's not normal. I mean, you feel like you're the one that something's wrong with, because the way that the doctors act, it's just like it's no big deal. And here you are as a parent going, "This cannot possibly be normal." It's extremely frustrating. Until I got to Dr. Vartabedian, it got to the point where my husband and I were screaming at each other because we were so frustrated. Neither one of us could figure out what was going on, and, you know, you play the blame game: Did you do something, did I do something, are we too worried about it, are we causing this? It's a nightmare, it's really a nightmare.
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