Since I was 12 I have battled with food and environmental allergies and intolerances. I remember when I was pregnant thinking wryly that I would probably pass this on to my child. I did.
I am lactose intolerant, but mostly affected by milk and cream, I react to tinned fish, can’t each too much tomato and cheese and react to changes in water everywhere I go. It makes for fun travelling! I have learnt to live with all this over the years and I can tell when to slow down on something, when my tolerance is low and when I can live a bit dangerously (so to speak).
I wasn’t looking forward to having to navigate that path with Noah though, but it was something we were faced with when he was just weeks old. In the middle of finding out how difficult it is to be a new parent and coping with lack of sleep and all the other things new parents deal with, we discovered our baby was lactose intolerant.
Ironically the breast milk I was struggling so hard to give him was what was making him sick. Every feeding session (which was between two and three hours apart and lasted 30 minutes to an hour) involved him being ravenously hungry, biting me in his eagerness to get some milk, then battling with his hunger and pain and pulling off quickly. This cycle continued for weeks and neither of us had much respite.
I tried everything I could think of – feeding him in different positions, giving him some formula and then some breast milk, or not eating any dairy products myself – but nothing seemed to alleviate his distress, and that was causing us distress as parents.
When Noah was 3 ½ weeks old I found out there is lactose in human milk and that was what was causing him such great pain. We swapped to lactose-free formula that night and he was a different baby. He slept for six hours and we felt like the clouds had parted and the sun was shining through.
For a few days before trying lactose-free formula we had tried others, including soy, but he was intolerant to them all except the one we found and so we stuck with that. Research since 2006 has shown there are different breastfeeding methods that can help with this problem, so I probably could have kept breastfeeding him, but this was the best option at the time.
Worried his lactose intolerance was going to affect Noah forever like it does for me, I spoke to the midwife at the baby clinic quite extensively. She told me it was not necessarily a life sentence because babies often grew out of lactose intolerance. Six months down the track Noah was eating yoghurt, cheese and biscuits/rusks with milk in them so I guess he was one of those babies.
We kept him on lactose-free formula until he was a year old and then tried cow’s milk. His little body reacted, so we switched to Liddell’s lactose-free milk. As advised by the clinic, we tried Noah on cow’s milk every six months to see how he coped. When he was 2 ½ years old he was OK and didn’t react and can now eat any dairy food without repercussions.
Ethan didn’t shares his brother’s lactose intolerance issues so it seems we had our food-related intolerance stint. On the other hand, they are both allergic to environmental factors like me and break out in rashes and eczema. Of all the things I could have passed down to my children, this is what managed to get through!
Do you have any allergy issues in your household?
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Johanna Baker-Dowdell is mum to two boys – Noah and Ethan – and combines looking after them with her work as a blogger, journalist, writer and public relations consultant. She owns and manages Strawberry Communications which started small in the third bedroom, but has grown into its own office space (in the converted garage).
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