Today Daniel is two months old.  It’s hard to believe.  We didn’t get any pictures because we didn’t have a good day.

As Daniel gets older, the debilitating side effects of Zantac are becoming more and more obvious.  After a while you begin to wonder if the cure is worse than the disease.  So yesterday evening we decided to not give his Zantac dose and see a) if his reflux was still as severe as it was at three weeks and b) what the side effects truly are.

It became obvious that his reflux and acid were just as bad and cost him severe pain, so we put him back on it today. We were also able to determine that these are truly Zantac side effects:

• Insomnia – the most sleep that Daniel manages to get in a day is 8 hours, where he should be getting 16 hours. Once he did not have Zantac, he slept almost continuously (except for waking up with acid in his throat).
• Stomach cramps – these usually start about an hour after he eats and cause him severe pain.
• Anxiety – this causes him to need to be held most of the time, and to be impatient.
• Aggravation of colic – without Zantac, his colic period was just a few hours. With Zantac he is colicky all day.

The only drug alternative our pediatricians can offer also has undesireable side effects, and our specific pediatrician is out of the office right now. Papa has an appointment with her on the 7th. Even if we can find another drug, Daniel will have to overlap Zantac with it for two weeks, so he has at least three more weeks of misery ahead of him.

Just to recap his current issues:

• It’s almost impossible to take him out right now. He becomes really anxious for two days or more if overstimulated.
• He can’t handle big routine change-ups right now. Uncle Daniel and Aunt Alice, the wonderful people they are, offered to babysit today while we went out and had a proper sit-down meal together. We were all set to take them up on that, but around noon it became obvious that with his hyper-anxiety from our experiment it wasn’t going to work out today.
• Mama can’t go anywhere right now. She has to hold him most of the day, and is only sleeping when Mimi or Papa sit with him during the day. Her normal sleeping hours are 7:20am until 1pm. In order for Papa to go to church on Sunday, she has to split her sleeping shift. She gets even less effective sleep that way, though, and it’s only worked out once in the last 9 weeks.
• He needs to be handled more than is comfortable. He has to be kept upright for an hour after each bottle, and the only way to relieve his colic (and even then for only a minute or two) is to hold him and constantly change his position.
• His poor mama is at her limit. She’s not sleeping or eating well, and people are telling her she’s failing. They’ve never heard of a mother needing help for more than a week or two, or they’ve never experienced a baby with Daniel’s extensive problems.

It’s been a rough couple of months, but also a time of joy and wonder we could never have imagined before. Please keep us in your prayers, and by God’s grace we’ll make it through this!