Why allergies? Why me?

Many people have quoted Hippocrates saying “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. I truly believe food can be medicine or the slowest form of poison. It can be healing to our gut or it can cause inflammation and disease.

Last February, I stopped breastfeeding and started having numbness and tingling in my hands and feet the very next day. The discomfort from this would last about four hours after I woke up. I was scared of what it might be, especially since my mom has Multiple Sclerosis. Would I have to live with this numbness and pain the rest of my life? I decided to get allergy tested with my boys because I had already scheduled this to try to figure out their reflux issues.

I found out that I have high autoimmune food allergies to dairy, gluten and egg. There were other foods on there but these three main ones were all very high. I had known dairy affected me for a while and rarely ate it so this one was easy to eliminate. I only ate gluten occasionally but eggs were a staple around our house because they were quick and healthy. Do you know how many things have egg baked into them? A lot! I cut all three out though. After three weeks of cutting them out, my numbness went away.

This was great because I knew how to solve the problem. It was also not so great in that I couldn’t have these things anymore. It’s like when you tell a kid they can’t have something…they want it that much more. It was easy to eat clean when I was doing Arbonne’s detox program. It’s easier when you are making the choice. When you can’t have something due to allergies though, you feel like it’s not really a choice. I went through a little bit of a pity party for myself when I first found this out. Everything other people were having looked so much better when you knew you couldn’t have it anymore.

If you are feeling this way, I promise it gets better with time. You realize that the food you long for is just not worth the way it makes you feel. I still don’t know if I have an autoimmune disease but I do know that I can manage it with food.

I never loved spending long hours in the kitchen before. It was just a waste of time in my eyes. I would be the one to grab cookies at the store for a potluck. I am slowly but surely learning how to enjoy cooking healthy and tasty meals. My husband and I have joked that I’m becoming like a healthy Betty Crocker. I’m going to post some of my favorite recipes that I’ve found for those that have dietary restrictions like us soon!

Our Tongue Tie Story

*Myth: if you can stick your tongue out past your lips, you are not tongue-tied.

Can you imagine what it’s like to run a race with your legs tied together? Some would argue that eating with severe tongue or lip tie is similar to this. I’m going to tell you about our journey. I have learned that there are two different kinds of tongue ties: anterior (towards the front of the tongue) and posterior (towards the back of the tongue). Most medical professionals are aware of the anterior ties that don’t allow you to stick your tongue out and will often clip these in the hospital. The anterior tie is pretty obvious. Unfortunately, most medical professionals that I have personally come across are not educated on posterior tongue ties.

Some babies that have tongue ties can still eat well. Diagnosis of a tongue tie should be based not only on the physical restriction in the mouth but also on the presence of symptoms. I’m going to share a lot of tongue or lip tie symptoms with you along the way in bold so you’ll be able to help me raise awareness on this topic!

You think that you will be way more relaxed with your second baby…and then you realize you are not. My second baby, Parker, gave me the most beautiful, natural birth experience. I had a vaginal birth with him after a cesarean section with my first breech baby and I was stoked. I felt so empowered and strong to have accomplished the natural birth I set out to do.

However, from there on out was less empowering to say the least. He aspirated twice as we were waiting to be released from the hospital. They attributed it to amniotic fluid which may have been true but my mom instinct now feels like it was also related to silent reflux. I was paranoid for a long time about Parker choking because he was completely silent whenever it would happen. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much in the beginning because of this and waking up every two hours for feedings on top of that.

He experienced jaundice in the first few weeks so we had to take him to be pricked daily to test his levels. You can tell a baby is jaundice when they have a yellowish tint to their skin and/or eyes. As a parent, you just see them as tan in the moment. There are lots of reasons for babies to develop jaundice in the early days but I later learned that it can be a symptom of a tongue tie. He was a beautiful baby with a cute, little stork bite on his forehead and another on the back of his neck. It seems to be common for babies with stork bites to have ties.

There was always something weird about the way he ate. He would pop off and on my breast. I always had to hold his head on my breast so that he would eat and compress my breast with the other hand to help milk flow better for him. He had a poor latch without me pushing my breast up into his mouth. Over time, he ate for fewer minutes and started to be more fussy. He couldn’t keep his pacifier in well either.

I brought all of these concerns up to his pediatrician and she said that it sounded like reflux. She was right. He did have reflux which explained why he was fussy at night and would always wake up arching his back in the night from pain and pushing away from me. Early morning was always especially rough. So, we put him on reflux medicine but I really didn’t notice a difference in the way he ate. I did notice a difference feeding him while he was asleep though. Now, I realize it’s because he was frustrated at not being able to eat well while awake or maybe even hurting.

So, I started nursing him while he was asleep which worked great I thought. He was slowly gaining weight which unfortunately is mostly what pediatricians gauge their wellness on. He started pooping less often which we attributed to constipation. Now I know that it is because he was not getting as much milk. His poop started becoming a greenish color which often can happen with foremilk/hindmilk imbalance. He was mostly getting the foremilk which is like skim milk at the beginning of nursing. Sometimes, this can upset babies’ tummies, especially if this is mostly what they are getting. He was not emptying my breast so he was missing out on the good, fatty hindmilk.

Everything came to a head when Parker was about 2.5 months old. He stopped napping well…so the whole nursing him while asleep thing was shot. He basically had developed an aversion to my breast while awake. He would try to eat for a minute and then he would just pull away bawling. I tried every single position feeding him. I did the side laying position and I even walked trying to nurse him. Then, he didn’t even want my breast if he was awake. I tried three different slow flow bottles with breastmilk in them since I had been pumping and he just gnawed on the nipple. I just thought he couldn’t do bottles. I was in shock that he just stopped eating awake. It’s a vicious cycle; you don’t eat well, you don’t sleep well. You don’t sleep well, you don’t eat well.

You feel like your job as a mom is to feed your newborn. Not being able to feed them makes you feel completely inadequate. It breaks my heart to think of all of the moms like me that felt this way and just always thought it was their inability. It’s not your fault and it’s not your baby’s fault. There is a physical reason that they cannot eat and medical professionals need to have more training to recognize the signs of this or hand out a pamphlet on symptoms at a minimum. You are not alone in this and you are still a great mom!

So I called the breastfeeding support line that Friday night. Thankfully, God had the right person answer the phone. She said “I’m really not supposed to say anything like this over the phone but it might be related to ties.” When she listed some of the symptoms for me, I knew that was our problem. She told me about a dentist that does a laser procedure on ties. So I anxiously tried to survive the weekend thinking I just have to make it until Monday. I sent my oldest son with family and tried everything I could to help Parker nap soundly enough to eat anything during the day. And I stayed up all night nursing him since he would only eat while asleep.

Monday came and Dr. Coleman was on vacation for a week! Thankfully, they checked their voicemail and referred me to another dentist in Fort Worth. We saw him Wednesday and he did a wonderful job. It was traumatizing to watch the laser done and hearing him gurgle on his saliva while crying. It only lasted for a minute though and I knew we had no other choice. If you’ve been through a tie revision, you know that relearning to use your tongue is not easy. You have never even been able to use it the way you were supposed to so you have no muscle memory. You do suck training to help retrain the tongue and stretches to keep the muscle from reattaching in a restricted way.

All of this combined with the aversion did not make the laser revision an immediate success for us. He was hungry, anxious about eating and just struggling. Aversions are very difficult to overcome. You can’t make someone want to eat. I saw multiple lactation consultants and they said “Just keep doing what you’re doing! You’re doing all that you can do”. This is not what I wanted to hear. I was staying up basically all night every night and he was still too worked up to eat if he was awake.

Finally, I went to his pediatrician and just bawled. I told her to admit us to the hospital and that I was ready for a feeding tube. I thought maybe if he wasn’t hungry anymore, his anxiety would die down and he would be willing to eat. I knew I was doing a good job of keeping him alive but I knew he was hungry and I had no other solution. She admitted us for “failure to thrive”.

I was astonished that he took the bottle that they gave him for the swallow study the next day! It was a very narrow, disposable Similac super slow flow nipple. Apparently, other slow flow nipples were still too fast and wide and gagged him so he gnawed to stop the flow. Thankfully, you can find these nipples on Amazon. It still was a long process getting him to eat. He had to be in the right emotional state and a quiet environment. It was an expensive hospital stay to find a bottle that he could do for sure. I was still thankful, especially that we didn’t have to do the feeding tube that we were scheduled to do right after we discovered this.

Slowly but surely he got better at drinking from these bottles. A month later, I noticed some regression. He went from eating four ounces at a time to only two. Some of his symptoms came back. I went to Dr. Coleman and he had partial reattachment of his tongue tie on one side. We revised that side again and he was able to go back to four ounces without those symptoms again! There was no way to deny the impact his tongue tie played on his ability to eat and be more comfortable.

Parker really didn’t start eating solids well until he could do finger foods by himself. He didn’t eat baby food well. This is common for tie babies to be finicky about textures. It was so nice when his eating picked up after nine months. I was so relieved to not have to worry about him getting enough for once. It took some of the pressure off of me mentally if he wasn’t drinking as much breastmilk as he should have been.

I tell everyone that I didn’t truly enjoy him until he was eight months old. I loved him to pieces. Obviously, I would have done anything for him and I did. I didn’t get a chance to stop and enjoy the small moments though. He was miserable and fussy most of the time leading up to this. Also, I was insanely stressed and sleep deprived which makes all the difference in the world. It was not his fault and I tell people this so they don’t feel bad if they don’t enjoy their newborns like they feel most people do. It’s hard to watch other people with their 98^th percentile babies who sleep through the night at six weeks just loving life while you are a zombie, just surviving. We didn’t sleep through the night until 18 months old with Parker. Also, I had a love hate relationship with my breast pump. I was so glad that Parker had breastmilk but up until 7 months old, I think I pumped around 7 times a day. It was all the benefit for him and none of the sweet emotional connection for me feeding him. I had to mourn the loss of just getting to nurse. I thought for sure it would happen with Parker after I had to pump with my first to get enough for him. I learned with Parker about ties and realized that was exactly what affected the breastfeeding relationship with my first.

It took until he was 13 months old for us to get his reflux under control. We learned what his autoimmune food allergies were and after cutting them out for a while and taking steps to combat the yeast overgrowth in his gut, his reflux went away! He was like a new kid. I was so happy to have a healthy, happy little boy after all that we had been through! Sometimes things don’t work out exactly like we had planned but God has a plan.

All of these details may not make the most interesting story but my hope is that someone going through something similar will read this and be able to figure something out for their little one. I felt so alone throughout this time in our lives and I want to help raise awareness of ties for parents and medical professionals so that others know early signs of ties and have resources at their fingertips to help them! There is a Tongue Tie Babies Support Group on Facebook that was invaluable to me throughout this process. I would have had no idea what to do as far as revision, therapy, and exercises go without it. I highly suggest that you ask to join the Tongue Tie Babies Support Group on Facebook if you are struggling with some of these issues. Also, this is not a complete list of tongue tie symptoms. You will find a lot by simply googling tongue tie symptoms in babies or children.

I want to end this blog telling you that I am not a medical professional and do not want this blog to be used as medical advice or diagnosis. Please see a provider knowledgeable on this to help you get the help you need. I am just sharing my personal experience as a mom and info that I have read or seen other moms post over the two years of my little one’s life. My only hope is to point you in the right direction if this sounds like you. If you join the Facebook support group, there is a list of preferred providers that are knowledgeable on ties for you to pick from. I should also add that there are a lot of other health issues that seem common for tongue tie babies that are not related to their ties but the common gene mutations that a lot of us have called MTHFR. This will be a whole other blog post in the future.

Mom Guilt

I almost killed myself trying to take care of my baby who would not eat. I have read more books and researched more things than I can say trying to get to the bottom of my first child’s health issues. And that is mostly why I started this blog…to help other moms with what I’ve learned along the way. If I can help just one mom with our experiences, that will be so worth it.

True fact: I had to stop writing this introduction twice to console my screaming almost two-year old. This is real mom life.

Sometimes our little ones just need their mom’s chest to bury their face into. Some kids need this more than others. This is definitely true of my second. As much as we love being the one they need; sometimes, we feel like we don’t get anything done really. We feel guilty for not getting other things done. And then, at the same time, we feel guilty for not spending every waking moment with our kids.

Why do we let mom guilt get the best of us?

We feel guilty if we breastfeed. We feel guilty if we don’t.

We feel guilty if our kids don’t eat healthy. We feel guilty if we don’t let them have enough treats.

We feel guilty for disciplining our kids. We feel guilty if we don’t discipline them enough. Disciplining kids sometimes feels like negotiating with terrorists. I now understand why our country refuses to do just that. Today, I found myself saying “come out here where I can see you” to my son who had snuck into my office and then laughed to myself as I realized it sounded like an episode of Cops.

We could literally feel guilty for almost every decision regarding our kids. I think we do this because we feel the judgments of other people, especially other moms. We get looks in the store because our kid is throwing a fit. We hear people say “I only breastfeed” or “why would you not just let them cry it out?” And most of the time, the guilt comes from our own insecurities because motherhood is hard! We had this idea of how it would be before we had kids. Do you remember saying “my kids will never act like that”? Then we had kids and everything changed.

First, we realized we were responsible for a human life. I don’t know about you but that was the most amazing and simultaneously terrifying moment in my life. You are the one solely responsible for this baby surviving and thriving. Parenthood is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever been asked to do, but I was so up for the challenge and I’m sure you were too. We were filled with a love we had never known before they came along and we would do anything to take care of them the very best we could.

You love them and give it your best and that is okay. Stop being so hard on yourself! All they really need is you! God gave them to you and knew that you were meant to be their mom. Sometimes, we over think it.

Parenthood is not all black and white either. Not all kids are the same. What worked for someone else’s child does NOT always work for yours. If I could tell you all the things I tried to make my babies eat or make them sleep, we’d be here all day. Sometimes others don’t understand why things were so hard for you when they were so easy for them. I learned later on why things were a bit harder. It wasn’t because I was a bad mom and it wasn’t because they were bad babies.

I decided after being a mom, I would not judge other moms. Sure, I decided to do things a certain way for my kids and I felt very strongly about most of them. Although, I would try my best to not be the voice that made some other mom feel guilty for her choices. I knew what that felt like. And to be honest, moms know their own kids better than anyone else. Don’t ever doubt your mom instinct; you know more than you think.

I was more insecure with my first. After my second though, I can hold my own. I can stand up to the doctor when they ask me to do something I don’t want to (something very untrue of my first). I can insist on things and advocate for them because I know that if I don’t, no one else will. I am not the best mom. I don’t know the half of it but I’ve learned a lot and I want to share it with you.

About Me

My name is Lauren Russell. I’m based in Oklahoma. I’m a wife, a mom of two boys, and a bit of a health nut. I have always considered myself a health enthusiast; however, more recently, I have spent numerous hours researching and reading books to figure out some of our family’s specific health issues. Some of our issues include food sensitivities, tongue ties, reflux, chronic Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, and PANS. I plan to share more about these issues and post about some of my favorite allergy friendly recipes and products. I plan to talk about all things mom. I started this blog to help other moms with what I’ve learned along the way. If I can help just one mom with our experiences, that will be so worth it.