Due to a rough start, my 10 week old DS and I never managed to establish breastfeeding, so he is now mainly formula fed, with a bottle of expressed milk a day. He happily drinks from the bottle and is on Aptamil.
However, the child is sick all the live long day. He’s sick when he’s just fed, he’s sick when it’s been a couple of hours since he fed. He throws up almost pure milk, curdled milk, and sometimes a mixture of mainly saliva (or stomach acid?) with small bits of curdled milk. Sometimes it doesn’t bother him, sometimes it seems to make him happy, like he feels instantly better, and sometimes he cries and looks in pain - though most of those times he seems to be able to swallow it back down if we give him a dummy. Sometimes it comes out of his nose, which he finds upsetting (as do I, the poor little thing
)
He is gaining weight ok - he’s only on the 9th centile but that’s where he’s been since birth. I’ve spoken to two doctors and the consultant who treated him on the neonatal ward, and no one seems overly bothered, because he’s gaining weight. The consultant said that he could have gaviscon or something but it would likely make him constipated, which he’s prone to anyway, so basically just to leave it.
We try to keep him upright during and after feeds and we’ve elevated the head of his bed. I guess pacing his feed more slowly might help, but I can’t do it - he cries as soon as the bottle is taken away for a break (we put a dummy in but that only fools him for about 0.6 seconds). He’s a real guzzler.
Is there anything else I can do, or do I just need to accept that until he grows out of it, my baby (and I, and many of the soft furnishings in my house) will need changing every hour of every day, and that our signature scent will be the smell of partly digested, regurgitated formula milk?