August is Gastroparesis awareness month. 💚
I met Gastroparesis at the end of 2013. I had a new baby girl who just recently had a life saving surgery and I was trying to hold my head up from all that when... BOOM! My first baby girl A 2.5yrs starts throwing up after everything she eats hours after! She'd nap and on her pillow she vomit during sleep. If she didn't vomit it all the way up she'd chew it and swallow it down. I was terrified. I knew something was wrong. My mommy instincts told me and I had good instincts considering my baby had just been through some life changing medical stuff.
She was so little and brave getting her Gastric Emptying Study scan done as we needed to see how fast her stomach was emptying. Within a day or so of her scan we got the results. A had Gastroparesis her stomach was paralyzed. We needed to come in to talk about how to help her. She had to be on daily antibiotics 4x a day to see if it would help her symptoms. Because there is no cure.
I was numb. She was just a baby! I was mad. Why was this happening?!? I already had my 5 month old placed under multiple doctors, surgery and hospital care. Now, A has to have a specialist. I can remember being so scared that she would end up having a feeding tube like baby sister. So far, she hasn't.
In K we dealt with a completely different problem. School. They made her stay in the classroom to vomit in the trashcan when she needed to. In front of her classmates! She even use to just hold it in her mouth and wait till her teacher noticed. 😔 Once I found that out I was not a happy momma bear. She had already been through so much in her little 5 years of life and then to have her vomit in front of kids. I couldn't believe it.
Over the years she's adapted and knows when she will throw up or she'll just swallow it down. It use to bother me so much but it isn't her fault. She can't help it. We've tried oh how we've tried different things to distract after eating. But 1-2 hrs something always comes up a tiny bit.
She's 9 now and it's been a long road full of ups and downs. We see a motility specialist at the children's hospital 5 hours aways every 6 months. Daily medications, tummy aches, bloated tummy's, nausea and other issues. She's such a fighter. She doesn't complain. I don't know how she does it when I look at her I know she's in pain I can see it. It's hard watching your tiny daughter have a bloated belly that she can't hide. Watching her eat a few bites because she's full even though she's hungry. She's my hero my strength.
Gastroparesis awareness is just a month to most but to her and my family it's been our life since she was 2.5. It's lifelong.
#Gastroparesis #SpecialNeedsMoms #ChildrenWithSpecialNeeds
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