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Posted by Exhausted Mama on February 15, 2000 at 20:04:14:I have an 18-month old who seems to literally survive on 5-6 hours of sleep per day. He has serious food allergies including milk, egg, peanut, pork, but we feel we have eliminated all these foods from his diet with the help of information from the Food Allergy Network. He has always had stomach problems which have caused him to wake frequently in distress and screaming during the night, but each physician we have been to has credited these problems to someone else. The gastroenterologist says the pain is caused by food allergies, the allergist says we need to speak with the gastroenterologist, and in the meantime this child does not eat well, sleep, and is well below normal height/weight for his age. He was even tested at our state children's hospital. With each doctor we go to, they only see a healthy-seeming, happy child and think we are exagerating or possibly even making up our nighttime incidents. They tell us to come back if things don't get better, which I have simply stopped doing.
For the past two weeks things have been much worse. He always wakes crying a few times during the night and can usually put himself back to sleep eventually. Lately, he wakes us at 2:00 a.m. (no idea how long he has been awake) by laughing/playing. He does not go back to sleep. We do not usually go into his room, but for the past two nights I have gone in about 4-4:30 and tried to lay down with him or rock him. To no avail. His daycare provider tells me he has given up naps in general and will occasionally sleep for 30-60 minutes. (He has been removed from the other children because he is keeping them up.) He is always cheerful and happy so we are all amazed, but I am at my wits end. The idiot pediatrician's office tells me he will sleep when he's tired.....but these are the same people who told me to feed a severely milk-allergic child yogurt because it "is processed differently and there is no danger for an allergic reaction." Perhaps I should have informed the emergency room staff of that diagnosis.
Has anyone else ever had anything like this to live through? The child has been off a bottle since 10 months so that is not a problem, has always gone to sleep by himself except when he has stomach distress, he has a relatively healthy diet (except very lacking in fat because he cannot eat dairy and rarely eats meat) because he is allergic to just about everything, and is always cheerful. I cannot go without sleep and am starting to worry that my stress will affect him even more. I do not believe he has some rare disease that only he has, I simply believe that no doctor will believe us or listen to us enough to treat him.
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