and we felt something heavy…DIARRHEA?
Last week was an eventful week.
We began to notice that Imanuel’s stools were quite watery. My
mother was the first to bring it up. (She’s been staying with us
to help nurse me back to health…it’s been the single greatest
blessing since the baby was born.) We were all sitting in our
bedroom and the baby begins to strain and turn red in the face.
Immediately following, we hear a gush of poop accompanied by
corresponding passage of gas from the intestine. (Bro, that one
was for you.) My
mom says, “Are you sure the baby doesn’t have diarrhea?” I went
on a quest to find out if what my mom said was true. The
descriptions were very similar to what the baby was experiencing.
His stools were yellow, watery, and seeping into his diaper. To
make matters worse, the information packet that the hospital gave us
said that if the newborn has watery stool to immediately call the
hospital. I started praying.
My mom suggested that we think through everything that might be causing
the baby’s diarrhea and see if the changes that we make, make things
better…so we went through the long list: 1) my diet 2) not
faithfully sterilizing the bottles 3) using filtered, not
distilled water 4) room temperature… and we began making
changes and anxiously waiting for Imanuel’s next stool. They
continued to be watery.
My mom went through a series of potential solutions to his
diarrhea…some less conventional than others. I’d rather not
mention some of the things we tried lest the doctor’s in our midst have
a cow. I was on the verge of having an anxiety attack…partly
because of the diarrhea, and partly because of some of the things we
put the baby through to try to cure him “naturally”.
Anyhow, after much grief and many many prayers that went up on behalf
of the baby, it comes to find out that breast-fed babies tend to have
watery stool (more so than formula-fed) and he didn’t have diarrhea after all. Oopsies, my bad. Sorry, baby.
Baby asleep on his changing mat where we change his watery-poopie diapers.