A Virus...Because...Hospital

We stayed in hospital over the weekend to trial a new feeding regime. Frankie had been on continuous naso-gastric feeds for a few weeks, with us making very small moves towards bolus feeds (where she is given a feed, then has a break). So, instead of giving Frankie her 60ml over two hours like we would on her 30ml/h continuous feed, we had been giving it over an hour and three quarters. Big woop. After Frankie miraculously kept down the radioactive 60ml of formula for her gastric emptying study, we decided to just crack on and try squeezing 60ml into 15 minutes five times each day instead. What could we possible lose? We had been admitted to hospital because Frankie was vomiting up to 10 times a day. Surely this couldn't be any worse.

It went against everything the hospital had told us. When a kid has reflux, or vomiting, their answer is to slow the feeds down. Do a slow continuous feed. Yet here we were, trialing the opposite. And it worked. Because, as we've been told so many times before, Frankie does not follow the rules or any kind of handbook that was written about babies and how they're medically expected to behave. She went 24 hours without a vomit. And then she got sick.

The ward is, quite obviously, full of sick children. Surprising right? Between the teenager with the broken leg and the baby who needs an MRI of her sore foot, are the kids with rhinovirus, covid, the flu and rotavirus. And before these kids have a diagnosis, they're free to wander the ward. To play with the communal toys. And so they should be I suppose. But when you take one teething toddler whose hands are almost constantly in her mouth, and combine that with the communal toys, and every other damn thing in the hallways that Frankie touched, a virus is kind of inevitable.

Snot and coughing tends to lead to vomiting with Frankie. So while we intended to stay in hospital and see if she was going to keep enough feed down to put weight on, it just wasn't going to work. It was impossible to know which vomits were attributed to which cause. So, we went home, again, with a vomiting baby. We went home trialling a brand-new feeding regime that went against everything we had ever been told to try with Frankie, and a revolting virus that meant all Frankie would do for days was cry with fevers, blow snot bubbles, cough and refuse to sleep.