Nighttime feeding issues

[alishacr]

My 6 week old suffers with reflux. We have recently started using infacol which seems to be helping. However for the past 3 days when he has woke for a feed between 4-5am he screams in pain with the feed, struggles to take his milk, has a mucousy vomit and looks generally uncomfortable. Other feeds he is better and I’m just wondering if anyone has any ideas why it affects him more at this time and if there’s anything we can do to help him. Awful seeing him so upset.

No idea why that feed would be worse if I'm honest. Is he BF or FF?

When I was researching reflux for my baby I read that there is an acid dump during the night, intended to kill off any bad bacteria that has made it into the stomach. This can result in reflux babies having a particularly tough time of it during the night. For my son that time was 3am. I don't know how true this is as I think it was on a specialist infant reflux woman's website and I'm always suspicious of people who claim they will be able to explain and fix all your baby's woes if only you give them several hundred pounds. I did feel this explanation made sense and matched my observations of my child though.

@PinkMimosa He is now formula fed and has been since he was around a week old. We ended up being seen in urgent care last night and they suspect CMPA so we have been prescribed nutramigen LGG to try. I just hope this works.

I hope it works for you too. Mine haven't had that formula but reading on here it seems to taste a bit more unpleasant. Did they give you any suggestions of what to do if LO doesn't like the taste?

@PinkMimosa it certainly smells disgusting and my partner tried it and he was borking. Baby has been borking with it and pulls such a face at the start of the feed and cries. It doesn’t seem like a painful cry like it was on normal formula, I think he cries because of the taste. On the nutramigen website it says it’s common for them to dislike the taste and to persevere, it says it can take 10 tries for them to begin to tolerate it big more regarding the taste.

A few friends of mine who have had babies on nutramigen and people on different groups have said adding alcohol free vanilla essence or milkshake powder such as crusha or nesquick helps with the taste for them. But giving that to my 6 week old baby just doesn’t sit right with me. He likes the taste of infacol so we give one dose of that before the feed and then add a dose into the made up formula (they can build up to two doses). That tastes of oranges and so far that seems to help.

@CasaMundi that would make a lot of sense. I also thought that because he is lying down throughout the night the acid could build up and cause more discomfort whereas during the day he’s upright a lot and also moving more. We fed him at 04.00 this morning and had a similar issue dispute being on the nutramigen although he was a lot better than he had been. Still cried but whether that was because of the awful taste of the formula. He has managed to take more in volume compared to previous days and definitely been a bit more settled than he had been.

I'm just hoping this does the trick as it seems that a lot of babies end up having to go onto neonate as the nutramigen hasn’t worked. I’m hoping he has a mild case of CMPA whereby this nutramigen works. It’s been so unbelievably stressful. I’m just glad we have been listened to by the doctor in urgent care.