I bound up to Eurospar to collect my DPD parcel. For some reason, they won't leave anything with my neighbours. I live in a village so my neighbours are businesses they deliver to on a daily basis anyway. Baffling. I digress.
I'm excited to collect my new digestive enzyme and probiotic. Since my son had silent reflux, a small amount of research I've done (read : Googling) has pointed to silent reflux being a result of a mothers poor gut flora. There's no scientific evidence to back this up so I call bullshit on it. Another way to place the heavy burden of blame on mothers. It's never crap sperm, is it? It's mum didn't take enough folate, had too much to drink, put on too much weight, had poor gut flora...drank a cup of coffee!
Yet. It plays on my mind. What if... What if I maybe had a better diet; hadn't been induced; hadn't eaten all that fish and chips; hadn't bought and consumed every packet of Rennie Deflatine in Ireland (that came up on auto-predict text on my phone I asked my husband to buy it that often 16 months later the phone still predicts it.)
So, consumerism and paranoia reign and I buy the digestive enzyme and probiotic. I've been drinking water kefir, a homemade fermented drink that can help "colonise gut bacteria" for the last 12 months. Again, there's very little scientific evidence for this. It doesn't taste awful neither is it moreish. The point is, despite all fact pointing to silent reflux being a massive baby "unknown" I blame myself. I think I can do things to prevent a future recurrence, should we ever be brave enough to start again.
The days were long, the nights were sleepless. The 45 minutes of baby hysteria 10 minutes after most feeds was gut wrenching. "I'm not being funny but; did you eat anything different?" "Bicycle his legs." "Baby massage is amazing." "Bring him to the doctor, that's not right." "It's not meant to be this hard."
I remind myself, I must take folate if we go again, don't want to go through tongue tie again. Same blame. I recall the doctor saying how prevalent it is. There's various studies saying it's a rise in diagnosis than occurrence; the rise of breastfeeding. Studies have shown folic acid can strengthen the mid-line therefore creating a tongue tie. The risk of not taking the folate or folic acid outweighs reasons not to. The tongue tie was easily snipped. It actually didn't affect his latch, we were swayed by the chance it could affect his speech. They say folate is less likely to over-strengthen the mid-line. Again, anecdotally.
The chance a different decision could affect his tummy, his tongue, his speech. He was 8 days old. I'd hardly had sleep. I was bombarded with decisions and blame and confusion.
I'm desperate to avoid it all, should we ever get lucky enough to be ready to have and have another. So I'll go out and I'll get the digestive enzymes, the probiotics, the folate. Equally, I'll drink the coffee and I'll eat what I want because it was hell anyway so I might as well keep the little joys, I'll probably be accused of them anyway, in the nicest possible way, of course!
