5 weeks old breast milk v allergy milk

[Feellikeimmfailing]

Feel like a failure my first child had CMPA, reflux and other allergies. I EBF until they were 12 months old and could transition to free from milk.
my new baby is 5 weeks old I have been dairy, Egg and Soya free for 3 weeks and they are still reacting, the reflux is that bad that I have to do a whole 10kg load of washing daily.
They are gaining weight but are very unsettled and uncomfortable and can’t be put down at all. They sleep very little and my first child 22 months old, has no time with me and is acting out and very upset by this understandably.
the baby is now on Lanzoprozole to try and control the reflux and things are worse! 😭😭😭😭
Thinking of switching to the allergy formula- pros and cons please?
I am very pro breastfeeding and really upset that it has come to this.

Any advice appreciated.

Completely understand this, went through similar and it was brutal.

very significant pro - someone else can share the load, if you have involved family/a partner
You may get more time with your first child
you could try a feed thickener in a bottle like carobel although it isn’t suitable for some allergic infants

Also some cons - I’m so sorry but I can think of a fair few.
it may be no better bottle feeding - your baby may still be super refluxy and it may even be worse because babies tend to glug bottles down - although you can avoid this by paced feeeing.
very hypoallergenic formulas taste absolutely foul and babies often don’t like them, and there is the potential for feeding aversions. Nothing worse than chasing a clearly starving baby around with a bottle, rinse, repeat, with all the palaver of sterilising etc
you have the immense hassle of getting repeat prescriptions for formula, making sure they are filled on time etc.
beeastfeeding is nutritionally superior especially when there is a family history of atopic reactions.

sending you good wishes, it’s horrible.

Is there any chance there is something else going on as well that could be causing discomfort?

I went dairy free with DC due to her wind and discomfort but it turned out to be tongue tie and fast let down (bad combo) causing a lot of the issues.

I have a multi allergy baby and she reacted to foods through my breastmilk and it was bloody hard work and it left me in poor physical and mental health. At one point I was down to only a handful of safe foods and she was still reacting.
Pros of breastfeeding are the milk can be healing, it tastes better than the formulas. The formulas are thin and can trigger reflux especially if there's an issue with reflux already.
Pros of formula is it's a more controlled diet so you can get them to symptom free quicker, others can help but they can still react to ingredients in the formulas. My daughter has a soya and coconut allergy and there was only one of the hypoallergenic formulas that was safe for her to have. Trialling of formulas not realising they were coconut based led to a bottle aversion that was very hard to get her over.
I exclusively breastfeed until 8 months, on an exclusion diet from 17 weeks. Between 8 and 10 months we tried to combifeed but struggled to find a suitable formula and overcome the bottle aversion. We switched to formula at 10-11 months and finally identified all of her allergens at 13 months and got her to symptom free. Once she was weaning it really was quite a challenge to manage both of our diets.
If you can get an exclusion diet to work I would say breastfeeding is preferable to formula as you will need to identify the foods they react to whether that is through breastfeeding or once weaning and if you do it through breastfeeding for us the reactions were gentler. They will also be exposed to other proteins in your milk and that might help with tolerance to other foods. If you are struggling to identify the allergens the formula does offer you a clean slate and you can take weaning slowly to figure it out as you go.

I had no support in figuring out her allergens just myself and a lot of food diaries. Thankfully my job involves spotting patterns in data and it did come in very handy in identifying everything.

In addition to my daughters allergies she has severe silent reflux and had moderate physical reflux. Her GP was only treating her physical reflux having her on lowish doses of omperazole. It was only after seeing a paediatrician for something else she was put on the highest dose of omperazole and we started to see an improvement. She ended up on 3 reflux meds and is still on this combination at 4.5! For us it was so much harder to get her reflux under control with allergens in her diet as the reactions caused her to have worse reflux. It was also much harder to identify her allergens whilst her reflux was uncontrolled as she was miserable permanently because of the reflux so it was hard to see which foods made her worse so we had to tackle both at the same time and go for high dose reflux treatment.

Have you tried to lay down on your back to feed the baby, I used to do this to slow the amount of milk going down, I also had an allergy baby with reflux, she was combi fed neocate formula as my husband was taking over at 6 months, she still had reflux whether she was breastfeed or formula fed, looking back I was told she had slight tongue tie but we decided to leave it as was only slight, but she was never as good with feeding as her older sister and I wondered if that was a contributer