It's All About the Poo... The End?

We might be at the end of this saga.  Here's to hoping.  We got the test results back from the lab, and all was negative.  No strange bacteria.  No parasites.  No ova.  No salmonella.  No shigella.  Nothing. This should be a good thing, right? Not so much.  I admit I cried a little, but out of frustration, not relief.  Corgan's stool was still pretty much liquid, and now all the tests said that there was nothing wrong.

We hadn't seen a new diaper rash in two weeks, so we now know that those were caused by a milk protein intolerance. Soy milk is my new best friend! She's back to having a cute, little baby butt that is pink in the way it's supposed to be, not with giant, red, irritated welts.  But her stool still wasn't solid.  After speaking with the lab, I asked that her doctor give me a call back to see what the next steps would be. The answer: a visit to the pediatric gastroenterologist.  I cried again.  No mother wants to hear that her daughters' issue is not resolvable by her pediatrician.  I did NOT want to have to take this route to figure out what was wrong, but we accepted the referral.  It was going to take a couple of days for the referral to get called in and for us to receive a call from the gastroenterologist, so we waited.

Joy came the following day at day care.  I picked up Corgan at the regular time on Thursday afternoon, and Ms. Jessica's face lit up when I walked in the room.  "She had a healthy poo!" Did I really hear that? I'd been keeping the day care teachers up-to-date with Corgan's bowel issues since they were with her for most of her poos, so they were equally joyous over the solid poo.  Ms. Jessica proudly proclaimed that her afternoon poo was a normal, healthy poo and that she was actually able to roll it off of the cloth diaper and into the toilet!  What great news!!!  We're now 5 days later, and still going strong.  We think the probiotics that we had been dosing her with had finally taken hold in her gut.  So, how do you get Corgan to have normal poos? Take whole milk out of her diet, go soy only for her drinks, don't ever give her juice (even cut with water), make sure she eats tons of food on the BRAT diet, minimize the amount of watery fruit she eats, and dose her with five days of good bacteria in her drinks.  Voila! A piece of cake!

I'd say we've progressed from a Type 7 to a good Type 5. Yeah!

We're hoping that this is the end of this wonderful journey in the life of a parent, but just in case, we do have the referral in our back pocket.  Here's to hoping to we never have to use it.