My Story

Let me tell you about what has bought me here and why I am so passionate about it.

I’ll start at the beginning when I was 5 week pregnant at the morning sickness and nausea kicked in. From that very first day until the day I gave birth I was nauseous all day long. I didn’t go a day without anti-nausea medication and that only took the edge off. I could barely function most days. Add to that, extremely low iron levels at 6 months and that second trimester glow that never came. I was living the dream pregnancy, right?

After making me wait an extra week past my due date, I had a 22 hour labor that that ended in an assisted delivery at 2am, thanks the umbilical cord being tightly wrapped around Arthur’s neck, twice. 

He struggled with the first latch. I remember the midwife grabbing me and shoving boob into his mouth. He must have got something because he went to sleep until the morning. The next feed I knew wasn’t right. My nipple was misshapen and I asked for help. None of the midwives helped to correct anything, just kept trying to sandwich boob into this mouth. He shredded my nipples during that feed.  Now I dreaded every single feed because it was excruciating. 

I saw a lactation consultant when Arthur was 3 weeks old. She assessed him and found he had a bit of a tongue tie and high palate but I should try every thing else to help the pain and look into a tie release as a last resort. The pain improved every day but it wasn’t until about 8 or 9 weeks I was finally pain free. 

When Arthur was 3 weeks old his sleep problems began. He would only contact nap during the day. The second I put him down, he woke up. Then some nights he had a long stretch before waking every hour until morning.  Some nights he wouldn’t even make it to midnight before starting his hourly wake ups. 

This is when I started Googling, why will my baby only contact nap? Why does he wake hourly? Why can’t I put him down? Why does my baby constantly fight sleep? Everyday I came up with some other version of the same question desperate to find answers. I found nothing.  Well, what I did find was, its normal. I just couldn’t accept a baby that wouldn’t sleep as normal. 

Around the 18 week mark, I started to notice that my diet seemed to be having an impact on Arthur’s behavior, crying and pooping. So I cut out dairy to begin. Things got better for a bit, then worse. so I cut soy out. Same thing, better for a bit them worse. Then I cut corn, then wheat, then garlic, peanut, gluten, oats, cocoa, every grain I tried, chicken and the list goes on.  Somewhere in there I learned about amines and cut out all high amine food. Again, things got better, then worse again. 

I went to 4 different GP’s asking for help but they all told me this was normal immature infant gut and that some babies just don’t sleep. I was on my own, no one would believe me.

At this point Arthur’s night sleep was torture. Every single night took me about 3 hours to get him to sleep in his bed and stay down longer than 20 minutes and then he still woke every 1.5 hours through the night. I would sit next to his cot sobbing while rocking him to sleep, too scared to lay down and close my eyes because being woken up hurt more than not sleeping. I was on about 4-5 hours of broken sleep each night. It was absolute hell.

To add to this Arthur refused to even be held by anyone else at night. If my husband approached to hold Arthur, the screaming would just escalate. 

Through all this I was having milk supply issues. I put it down to not eating and drinking enough food and water, until I remembered about the tongue tie. Truth be told, I had a feeling about the tongue tie since about 8 weeks old, but he had good output and good weight gain so there wasn’t any obvious signs of a problem. 

When Arthur was 6 months old, he had his ‘obvious’ tongue tie release and my supply issues disappeared. I also learned at this point that tongue ties can impact sleep and cause night wakings. I was crossing everything that this was my solution.

Another month passed and he still wasn’t sleeping. I finally paid for some help and in just one phone call to Jade, a parent educator, she found the last piece of the puzzle, a salicylate intolerance. 

At 7 months old, we went on a total elimination diet. Eating only lamb, peeled pear, peeled potato and nuttlex. We finally found a dietician who would help us and not just suggest he be formula fed instead, like two others did. I finally started to see results. His sleep got bearable. It was no longer tortured every single night. 

But that isn’t the end, Arthur also doesn’t eat solid foods. I saw two different speech pathologists and they both told me Arthur had a pain association with food. That was true, he did. Except when he did want to eat he wouldn’t swallow anything. I had a gut feeling that something else was wrong but neither could see any problem. He is now 12 months old, still 99% breastfed and booked in to see a third feeding specialist after we went to see a second pediatric dentist to check whether the tongue tie was released correctly. 

Arthur’s problems are far from over but we are now at a manageable point. I have been through so much pain and heartache trying to find answers. Everyone dismissed me and no one would help. I know so much more now than I did the day Arthur was born.  I have been through the worse months of my life but I am strong and I am determined. No one else deserves to go through even a portion of what I have been through and this is why I am here.