This entry was originally posted on my personal blog on May 24 2008 and is the first in a series of articles written about our personal journey with eating problems and tube feeding.

I’d like you all to sing along with me “tube free, as free as the wind blows” okay so those are the only words I know also, we’re only tube free “for now”. By “for now” Diet Girl means, should she begin to loose weight or if her development is impacted we won’t have a choice. This is fine for us, having spoken privately my husband and I came to this agreement on our own. But this is still good news.

Better than that, Diet Girl made a phone call upstairs to Speech Woman so we have an appointment with a speech pathologist/therapist in a week! Now the healing can begin!

Seriously though, Diet Girl did have some interesting ideas. For instance, we use a product called Poly Joule to add extra calories to Miss E’s formula; each scoop adds 129 kilojoules without adding too much bulk to her milk. Diet Girl suggested we reduce the amount of Poly Joule we give as, she says, it can make you feel fuller and therefore reduce the amount of milk she’s taking. It may work. You never know your luck in the big, bad city.

She’d also like Miss E to do a Barium swallow test to see if we can find the physiological cause of her reflux. It’s non invasive and, from what I’ve heard, fairly easy so we’re up for this. I don’t know if Miss E’s paediatrician/neonatologist will be, he’s previously said that there’s no reason to do one.

Thirdly she also says we may want to try a soy based formula. If there is no physiological cause for her reflux the problem may be caused by something as simple as a milk allergy. This would make a whole hell of a lot of sense seeing as most of my family have problems digesting milk.

We also have a highly optimistic suggested meal plan for a one year old. When Miss E’s entire days solids ends at a single fish finger, I’m not sure I’ll have much luck getting her to eat cereal, toast, fruit, cheese and half a cup of milk/formula just for breakfast! We’ll see, I’ll post an update in a week.

Oh! I also most forgot. In the past 2 weeks Miss E has gained 280g/9.8oz which is almost ten times more weight then she gained in the previous three months which is what got us into this mess to begin with. She’s also grown half a centimetre.