By November she was still not eating solids and not yet strong enough to try sitting up yet. She was smaller than a lot of other babies but she was tiny to begin with.
In December I did some casual work while hubby was on school holidays. This meant she had to take expressed milk in the bottle which she did without too much fuss.
By January I had seen our GP and had her checked out. She was losing weight :(
She was 9 months old and weighed 6kg.
Her length hadn't changed and her head circumference was around 44cm.
By the end of January she had started refusing the bottle and she had a lesion under her tongue where her tongue tie was snipped. She was put on antibiotics with no effect.
We went off to the Paed to see what was going on.
As our Dr had treated all of my kids he knew A's background and was a lot more respectful of my Mothers intuition than other Doctors may have been. My little girl was quieter, didn't cry when she woke up, didn't cry when hungry and was getting paler and skinnier. I could now feel her ribs when I picked her up and her head and tummy were floppy. She didn';t sit upright on my hip and she felt very low tone.
The Paed tracked her weight and growth and decided to send her off for some basic blood tests.
The first time we had blood taken the nurse had a lot of trouble finding the vein so the second time we went to the hospital and had it done there. When they put the belt around her arm she had loose skin which kept getting in the way :( She had all this flabby skin with no fat underneath it.
Here we are back from one set of tests:
Needless to say that wasn't the only time she had blood taken.
We were starting to see the rings around her eyes and the blue veins were standing out.
After the first few blood tests came back with nothing we were then tested for allergies just in case. Nope that came back fine too.
10 months and still not eating and now at each appointment when weighed she was losing around 20-40g a week.
The Paed was talking to a scientist at PMH about other tests to run when he decided to test for B12.
An unusual one as normally only vegans get low B12 and that was not me.
Surprisingly the test came back with extremely low levels of B12. Now the question was how?
She was given injections of B12 to raise her levels and was also sent her off for X-Rays to check everything was ok internally.
Vitamin B12 deficiency – this is most commonly found in the elderly, vegans (vitamin B12 is only found in foods of animal origin) and breastfed babies of vegan mothers and is called pernicious anaemia. Symptoms include tiredness and fatigue, lack of appetite and weight loss, apathy and depression, anaemia, smooth tongue and degeneration of peripheral nerves progressing to paralysis.
Needless to say I stopped Googling for causes and symptoms when I came across this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency
Long term neurological disorders.....
The next step was to test me to see if I was the cause. As L was fully breastfed I was the only source of food for her. So then I went off to get blood taken and L had more blood taken to see if the injections had helped.
The test results came back to show her B12 levels were still low but mine were normal.The tests for metabolic disorders showed nothing. It is thought if I wasn't low then she must have a disorder which stops her body holding onto the B vitamins.
With that last test showing nothing our Paed got onto the phone with the hospital. They asked that she be admitted for a week of evaluation and testing. We had to wait for a bed to become available and they would phone when they were ready.This was on Monday.....
No comments:
Post a Comment