HI everyone,

Trish again, with another update on how "relatching with an almost 2 year
old" is going.

In just the short time since I posted, Bobby will now take a bottle nipple
all the way into his mouth.  His sucking is really unorganized and sloppy,
mostly with bites, but if I squeeze the bottle to make it easy for him to
get the milk, he does suck on the nipple.  You don't know how encouraging
it is to see him doing something so normal. (Sucking, I mean, not
necessarily on a bottle nipple!)

I was at a party the other night with many nursing babies.  I was able to
give Bobby a real bird's eye view of a toddler nursing, and he watched and
looked away a few times, but I could see that he was intently looking.  I
didn't think too much of it until about a half hour later, when someone sat
down next to me, not knowing Bobby's story, asked me what the NG tube was
for.  As I was explaining how he came to have it, she asked me if he nurses
at all anymore.   I said, pulling up my shirt, "No, not really, watch,
he'll lick it once in a while...", and as I was blabbering away, he grabbed
my breast with both hands and licked the nipple with this long, lapping
tongue, over and over, looking up at me and smiling.  It was all I could do
to breathe!  The woman next to me thought this was totally normal, and had
no idea what she was witnessing was near miraculous.  So I don't really
care if he ever nurses again, because I'm just having too much fun watching
him shock the pants off of me when I least expect it!

Then there was something else that happened this week that I wanted to
share with all of you.  I was talking to Bobby's cardiologist about the
medication they are beginning to use to decrease lymphatic drainage in
babies with a chylothorax.  It is called somatistatain, it is a naturally
occurring hormone in our blood, and it is also found in breastmilk in
concentrations 4 times higher than that of our bloodstream.  Bobby's case
was the first time they had ever tried it at his particular hospital.
Anyway, he told me that they have used somatistatin on 4 other cases of
chyothoracies since Bobby left the hospital last year, and not one of them
was successful.  No coincidence, I think.  It must have been the
combination of the somatistatin in the skim breastmilk and the synthetic
somatistatin (medication name "Octreatide") which proved to be enough to
stop the drainage.  Just thought you LCs who work in the NICUs might find
that interesting.

Can I say thank you enough to all you wonderfully supportive people?  I
can't tell you the difference in both my and my son Bobby's attitude toward
this whole process  since I posted about a month ago.

Trish Whitehouse, RN, LLL Leader

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