I'm a parent who tries everything prepackaged that I give to my son. After all I haven't eaten this kind of food for more than a quarter of a century I figure I should give it all a try. After trying the Nutramigen I nearly threw up and I reassessed my earlier thought that normal enfamil was the worst tasting formula ever. My son at first wasn't even willing to drink the stuff because of its taste. We had to camouflage it with juice beginning with half and half and finally making it to a solution of 8 oz. formula 1/2 oz. juice. Eventually we were able to wean him of that and now he drinks it without any taste enhancer. I've relearned through my son that you learn to live with what you have and thank goodness we have this formula.
Nutramigen has transformed my son. Before my son was diagnosed he was extremely weak and although he wanted to crawl and could do the army crawl he wouldn't go very far at any given point. About 2 days after being on the formula he began army crawling all over the house. It really felt like a miracle to me, to my husband it was just logical science, but to me it really was a miracle as was everything else that seemed to happen after we switched him on to formula and food that didn't hurt him.
Since my son had figured out he could turn over he would roll over as soon as he was in bed and curl himself up into a little ball; any noise, any at all, would wake him up on the spot. I couldn't even go in and check him in the middle of the night without him waking up and I most definitely couldn't move him from one place to another if he had been sleeping. I couldn't even snuggle him to bed, as I had done when he was very little, he would just want to be left alone. People advised me to run a vacuum cleaner under his bed to get him used to noise so that he would learn not to wake up in the middle of the night just because he heard the dogs walking around the house. There were also other issues, like the fact that he screamed bloody murder when we tried to put him in his stroller or car seat. Once he was in it he would usually calm down when we were moving but, as soon as the car would stop or we would pause in the stroller he would start howling again. The only thing that would calm him down in the car was to listen to music, and very specific music at that, my son is picky. I must have listened to this one song exclusively for one month straight every time we were in the car. My husband and I just thought this was who he was. After all we were told babies wake up in the middle of night, some babies don't like their car seats...that's just how it goes.
Well it wasn't and that wasn't just who he was. Once we switched to the Nutramigen and made sure he didn't eat anything with milk and eggs he started sleeping sprawled out on his back and side, he slept through music and us banging around the house, I could move him from the car to his crib and he wouldn't even open his eyes, he stopped crying in the car every time I put him in the car seat and he didn't care that the car would stop. I was even able to change the music. This to me was the most shocking part. All this time I had thought that this was my son's personality just to find out that what we thought was his personality was him in extreme pain all the time. I was surprised honestly that he didn't cry more often than he did. My son truly is a trooper.
After discovering all the things that had been effected by his allergies I was really angry at myself that I hadn't been more stubborn with the doctors and insisted without taking a no that they test my son for allergies. However, I've learned that allergies are considered rare and because of this are one of the last things that the doctors will test. In addition to that apparently many parents feel their children have allergies when they are just intolerances and therefore, the doctors don't take the parents always so seriously because the parent "diagnosis" is usually wrong. I wasn't but I could have been and based off of the statistics I probably was in their mind. My husband has been really good about insisting that I did everything that I could have for our son at the time and that I was constantly at the doctor trying to figure out what was wrong. I've come to feel that he is right. However, I've also learned that if I'm not happy with the answer and feel that there is more to it that I will be more insistent in the future after all I'm my son's voice right now and if I don't speak for him no body else will.
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