My little boy has acid reflux disease (GERD). I was wondering why he was so irritable, why he never slept for long. Well, you'd be irritable too if you had nasty stomach acid backing up into your mouth, keeping you from enjoying your milk or getting a good night's rest! As you can imagine, no rest for baby means no rest for Mommy. I just feel bad for getting annoyed with the fact that he wouldn't sleep for very long, but it's so hard to just begin to fall asleep at 3:30 in the morning and your baby wakes you up with blood-curdling screams after having only slept 20 or 30 minutes. Now that his pediatrician has diagnosed him and let me know that he needs a more upright sleeping position, he seems to be sleeping for longer periods of time, although the spitting up is still pretty bad.
Anyway, I'm trying to be as positive as I can about this. Well, I am today. Yesterday I locked myself in the bathroom as my Mom sat with him in the living room and cried my eyes out over how unfair it seemed for this little guy to be in such obvious pain, and how worried I was that he might not outgrow it, and how overwhelmed I felt by all the scary side effects of having GERD, like sleep apnea. But today I remind myself that there are parents with babies that have illnesses that are far, far worse to contend with, so I offer gratitude to the Universe that my baby is a very healthy little boy, aside from the crappy luck of having to deal with acid reflux. In lots of cases this goes away on its own in babies, at about six months or so, and that is what I am going to focus on, while helping to manage the symptoms until it goes away. In any case, I still feel incredibly lucky. He is so beautiful and I love him sooo very much (not that I wouldn't love him as much if he wasn't so beautiful!).
