It's All About the Poo - The Update

Many of you may remember my post a few weeks ago with the diaper rash saga we are going through with Corgan. Well, I finally got fed up with the loose stool and started Googling treatments.  Most people tell me about the BRAT diet (banana, rice, apple, or toast), and trust me, we've tried it. Does nothing.  During this search I stumbled upon some information that said babies with severe diaper rash are sometimes reacting to the proteins in whole milk.  Back in January we had switched Corgan from formula to whole milk, and when we did a backwards regression on the issue, the diaper rash saga roughly coincided with this switch.  

Could this be an answer?!?  Could whole milk be our problem? She had been drinking soy-based formula since she was about two months old, because she would get really bad gas.  When we switched her to the milk at a year old, there were no gas issues, so we (and her pediatrician) thought she had outgrown the issue. This past weekend we quickly switched her to soy milk and within two days her diaper rash had cleared up (for the first time in 3 months)!  Uh, oh.  New problem.  Her loose stools from before went basically to liquid.  Back to the Google Machine! Did you know that drinking soy milk can give you runny stool?  I sure didn't.  Some of the suggestions on the web said to switch to rice milk instead of soy, but I didn't want to try anything without calling her pediatrician.  I'm glad I made the phone call.

Since Saturday morning we've been collecting poo samples.  Wow, the things a mother will do for her child. In the meantime, we've also been giving her probiotics twice a day in hopes that we can get some good bacteria back in her gut.  The doctor's current thinking is that the milk allergy might have irritated her stomach and intestinal lining enough that it killed off the good bacteria, hence the goopy poo.  If so, the probiotics will help in 5-7 days, if not, I have beaucoup poo samples chillin' in my fridge to take in today. They'll send them off to the lab to see if they can figure out what's going wrong.  The really annoying part is that as of me writing this on Sunday afternoon, we're starting to see diaper rash come back. Grrrrrrr!  At what age do we start potty training? It's not soon enough!!!!! Please keep the prayers and well wishes coming as we continue to try and figure this out!!!