Oh lordy I'm in a pickle.
My 3 wk old baby is exclusively BF and has always been very farty. If it's 'something I ate' as per the MW and HV then I'm reckoning it's got to be air or water, because my diet is varied but the wind is consistent. Of course, it might be something ubiquitous like milk or wheat ...
The thing is, for the past 48 hours he's been miserable (to the extent that we saw an out of hours GP the other night - all she could really tell me was that he wasn't dying). He's been a quiet, contented baby from birth, whinges rather than cries and is generally easily settled. But all of a sudden he's changed - now he's either asleep, feeding or screaming and writhing in pain. I don't mean for a few hours at night, I mean every time he wakes up he's straining and thrashing around.
We've been giving Infacol since this all started, and warm deep baths, doing baby tummy massage, rumbling round in the pram, propping him in the bouncy chair etc. He generally seems happier upright - currently he's sleeping on my shoulder, but if I try to lie him down in his basket (we've already raised the head of that) he'll be awake in a flash. Nothing's helped so far - plenty farting but not enough to relieve the pain it seems. The only thing which reliably soothes him is sucking desperately, which has taken its toll on my poor boobs. He's equally happy with my finger.
I hate dummies personally, and although I feel BF is quite well established and I'm confident with it, I gather they're frowned upon for BF babies. But if he's spending his waking hours latched onto my finger, wouldn't a dummy be a slightly more convenient evil? And is this stuff about diet and BF really true - I'm on day 2 of dairy-free because it's about the only possible offender.
The general response to my hand-wringing from doc/HV so far is along the lines of 'he's got colic, he'll grow out of it', wih a subtle undertone of 'babies cry, dumbass, deal with it'. But this is so persistent and completely unlike him I can't help my gut feeling that something's actually wrong. Also, OH goes back to work in a week and round-the-clock finger sucking/chair bouncing/pram pushing vigils are going to be much, much harder without 2 of us. Does anyone please have any pearls of wisdom/experience/suggestions?