Back in April, at some point Dorothy developed what seemed (to us) to be a bit of diarrhea. In all other respects she seemed fine, and the doctor didn't seem too worried about it. She said that Elizabeth could try taking all dairy products out of her diet, because Dorothy might be allergic to milk proteins. (Some babies are allergic to cow's milk proteins. Almost no babies are lactose-intolerant, otherwise they wouldn't be able to drink their own mother's milk. But the cow's milk proteins can be in cheese, butter, etc.) Elizabeth did cut down on dairy, but we didn't notice a huge change in Dorothy's poop. Of course, it can be hard to remember what things were like weeks prior, so we could have been a bit wrong.
A month or so later, while seeing the nurse for something else, we asked about the poop, and after taking a look, the nurse said that it was within the normal range for babies. Given that the diarrhea had started right after Elizabeth had switched her granola cereals to one that had nuts in it, we thought maybe it had been the nuts (which are also common allergens). Clearing dairy out of one's system can take weeks, so Elizabeth stayed non-dairy (eventually coming as close to 100% non-dairy as she could) for quite some time.
Then a week or so ago, thinking that perhaps dairy hadn't been the cause at all, Elizabeth used a tiny bit of butter in grilling some foods. We didn't see any change in Dorothy. We decided to try putting more dairy products into Elizabeth's diet. She stopped worrying about breads that had been made with butter. But rather than slowly add in dairy products, and wonder whether or not any given change in Dorothy was due to the dairy change or just a random fluctuation, Elizabeth suggested doing a food "challenge." This is where you suddenly add in a bunch of the suspect food, and see what the reaction is in the baby. If problems develop, then you can be reasonably certain that food was the problem.
So on Wednesday, we ordered pizza (because it has lots of cheese on it). Dorothy seemed fine that night. The next day, Elizabeth had some ice cream after lunch, and in general tried to consume lots of dairy.
As far as we can tell, Dorothy's poop hasn't changed, but she's been sounding extremely congested at night. She'd been like this back in May, too, and congestion can be another symptom of an allergy. After all of us having gotten multiple good nights' sleep earlier in the week, Elizabeth woke me up at 5:30am today to take Dorothy, because Dorothy hadn't been able to sleep since 2am unless she was being held vertical by Elizabeth (which means Elizabeth wasn't able to really sleep much at all).
For the moment, now, Elizabeth is going to go back to a non-dairy diet. I'm wondering if some low levels of dairy (eg. frying with butter) would be OK. In any case, we hopefully (knock on wood) won't have to worry about it for too long. Most babies are supposed to outgrow this type of dairy allergy by around 6 months of age. We're keeping our fingers crossed!
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 19, 2004 06:42 AM