Lyra: Our First Year Together

September 17, 2013January 6, 2015 whoopsiepiggle4 Comments

Lifespans in Life

The majority of the Down syndrome blogs are written by families whose child diagnosed with Ds is under the age of three. In an online group I belong to, mothers openly wonder why this is the case and what happens to families who have older children with Ds?

I’m pretty sure I know. People move on in life and after three years, having a child with Down syndrome is no longer a novelty. The news of an extra chromosome in a new baby has been digested, how T-21 manifests in an individual child (particularly in terms of any serious medical issues) has been observed and, finally, the remediation for baby’s particular needs has been identified and (ideally) implemented. Baby’s Ds has normalized within his or her family. And just as families do with every baby, whether a child is born with a diagnosis or not, the family resumes dealing with the normal complexities of life.

I’ve seen similar situations many times over. Homebirthers have a hard time detaching from the midwives who’ve just helped them have amazing births. Many of these new moms consider becoming midwives, but only a few do. I’ve known women who, having worked through breastfeeding challenges with their own babies, go on to become La Leche League leaders. But few continue in leadership roles long after their last child weans. When children become school age, some mothers become ardent advocates for particular types of education or homeschooling. But by the time the kids are in middle school, or certainly high school, parents often relax on education. Many homeschoolers start attending school, and children who are privately educated through elementary and middle school frequently attend public high schools. Intensely held positions melt away as the needs of children change. And, too, children find their own paths and must strike out with lessening assistance from their parents. Life, forever transitory, goes on.

Why I Write

I write because I am a writer. When prevented from writing for any length of time, I have a hard time sleeping because essays clutter my thoughts. When I was pregnant with Lyra, and had no idea the baby I was carrying had three 21^st chromosomes, I began writing about my family. Oh, I’ve written about us before, an entire book, in fact. But this time, I began work on a series of essays and had several outlines in mind.

I also process life by writing, which is especially helpful with the harder stuff. My ex-husband, who throughout our marriage had tried to convince me that I was a chronic depressive and should, therefore, be unendingly grateful to have him in my life, told me some months after I left him how he envied my ability to figure things out by writing. Shortly thereafter, he stole my journal off of my computer and presented it to the divorce court as evidence that I was not mentally stable enough to have custody of our children. Leaving that marriage was scary business and, for the first year, I frequently questioned myself. I don’t know if the magistrate handling our divorce ever read my journal, but nothing came of it. Except further validating my decision to divorce.

Yes, writing essays about family became a different project than I had first envisioned because Lyra is a different child than we had anticipated. I write about our experience as we unpack our new lives, which now includes a daughter with Down syndrome and congenital cataracts.

Not Just a Down Syndrome Blog

As I routinely point out, and hopefully demonstrate, Whoopsie Piggle is a collection of essays about my family, of which Lyra, a child with Down syndrome, is one of five siblings. Certainly she is something of the star of the family, but in my experience, the babies in most families are the stars. If Lyra had merely 46 chromosomes would I know now what I do about Ds? No way. This first year with Lyra was like finding myself in a graduate program on Trisomy-21 and all the related medical, social and cultural issues. Writing what we have learned about our daughter, as well as Ds in general, again helps me process my life as it has now been redefined by my fifth child. And by being publicly available, perhaps it might help another mother, and her family, who discovers the baby she is carrying or just birthed has Down syndrome.

However, I have many essays living rent-free in my head like squatters that have little, if anything, to do with Lyra and her 47^th chromosome. In the past year, I have written through our learning curve on Down syndrome, along with the medical challenges Lyra has faced. Now, a year after her birth, our family is a boat once again sure of its ballast. Which was also the case when my four older children had their first birthdays.

But before evicting those squatter essays onto the pages of Whoopsie Piggle, it seems appropriate to give Lyra a full blast of the spotlight.

Lyra’s Eyes—More Concerning than Down Syndrome

When I first held Lyra, I immediately noticed her eyes were “Downsy-shaped.” Shortly thereafter, I saw the ghostly pallor of her pupils. At an ophthalmologist’s office three days after her birth, we learned that Lyra had bilateral, congenital cataracts. We were referred to a second, pediatric, ophthalmologist, whom we saw that same day. He immediately scheduled surgical lensectomies for both of Lyra’s eyes.

Hanging around a pediatric ophthalmologist’s office as much as I have in the past year, where the waiting room is often filled with babies born with cataracts, one might easily assume congenital cataracts are common. They are not. Congenital cataracts occur in the United States (and the U.K.) in 3 to 4 out of 10,000 live births. That’s less than .4%, making it pretty rare. Though not considered a marker of Down syndrome, of the infants born with cataracts, the majority of them also have Down syndrome. But even within the Ds population, congenital cataracts are rare, effecting approximately 3% of babies born with Ds in the U.S.

Statistics Versus Reality or When the Number Is Yours

We feel very lucky—providentially, miraculously lucky—that Lyra was spared any of the heart defects commonly found in infants born with Down syndrome. However, for the first two months of her life, all Max and I could focus on were Lyra’s cataracts. Not her Down syndrome and the challenges it might present, but her blind eyes. Her cloudy lenses barred all images; only bright light gained access to her retinas. When she was a few weeks old, Lyra’s eyes started wandering waywardly in their sockets, never in tandem. Bereft of any visual input, the parts of Lyra’s brain that process vision remained unused. Left that way, those parts of her brain would have become effectively obsolete.

Lyra was six and seven weeks old when she had her lensectomies, first on her right eye, and then on her left. More than anything, I was anxious about Lyra having general anesthesia. At eight pounds, she was barely bigger than a bag of sugar. I did not cry when my midwife told me Lyra appeared to have Down syndrome, nor did I cry when genetic testing confirmed the diagnosis. But when a nurse took my six-week-old infant from my arms and walked her down a hallway to the surgical suite, Max and I stood watching until the doors closed. And then I turned into Max’s arms and wept, my sternum burning like I’d just run up a long hill. Please don’t let her die.

Five hours later, we were home where Lyra quickly recuperated. Because everything went so smoothly, the second surgery, exactly a week later, was not nearly as emotional. Soon after her lensectomies, Lyra began wearing specialized contact lenses and, as I described in “Lyra’s Eyes” so too began the bimonthly torture events otherwise known as lens changing appointments. Still too young to understand that contact lenses give her vision and should therefore be tolerated, if not welcomed, Lyra has only improved her fighting techniques. I walk into the exam room with a baby who momentarily transforms into an eel—slick with sweat and strong enough to twist in all directions. Lyra also uses the small openings of her eyes, a Ds marker, as one of her tactics. She shuts them so hard in these appointments that her upper lid sometimes turns inside out. An optical speculum is absolutely required. As are three people.

New Trick

After a year of successful contact wearing, I noticed one day in August that the contact in Lyra’s right eye was missing. We were in the Green Mountains of Vermont (read: far away from specialized pediatric ophthalmologists), where we’d just arrived for a two week vacation. Lyra’s right eye is the one with an elongated pupil, part of her iris having been nicked off during the lensectomy. Without the familiar bubble of an aphakic contact lens, Lyra’s pupil looked different, prettier even, or maybe just more normal, to me. I felt like I was seeing her sighted eye for the first time. With her lenses in, I am reminded of the band director I had my sophomore year of high school who wore glasses with a very strong bifocal correction. His eyes looked odd due to the magnification. When he took off his glasses, usually to rub his temples after trying to teach us a new piece of classical music, he looked normal.

“You know she won’t have to wear these lenses much longer,” said Lyra’s ophthalmologist when we returned home and I told him about the appearance of her lens-less eye. “When her eye is big enough, we can get her into a different lens without that big silicon bubble, I might even be able to fit her in them in the next few months. We’ll see.”

A few days after her missing lens was replaced, Lyra removed the lenses from both her eyes. Astronomically expensive ($500+/pair), we searched but only found one. As a result we have:

Figured out how she takes them out. She puts her third finger in her mouth and her forefinger at the outer corner of her eye and pushes. We now remove her hand from her face whenever we see her doing this.
Purchased, as back up, glasses with the tiniest frames and the thickest lenses.
Been told by her eye surgeon that the new lenses without the thick silicon bubble are also smaller in diameter and, as a result, will suction more securely onto her eyeballs. He has ordered her first pair.
Baby glasses with Mama glasses

Seeing Clear and Straight

After her lensectomies and with her aphakic contact lenses, Lyra became a sighted child and her brain has developed as such. She looks towards sounds she hears or at people, animals and toys she wants. Soon after the lensectomies, Lyra’s right eye dominated her left, although both eyes regularly crossed inwardly, towards her nose. We patched the right eye for months, with little impact other than to irritate the skin around her eye.

The medical term for crossed eyes is strabismus and is based on the Greek word for “squint.” I learned this after I described to the surgeon how Lyra sometimes squeezes one eye shut while scrunching up the same side of her face. Many people who see her do this make Popeye references and more than a few have quoted the comic sailor man. I’m afraid we all laugh. Poor kid.

“We aren’t sure why kids with strabismus squint, but the best guess is that it helps them to focus,” Lyra’s eye surgeon told me in June. “I think we’ve done all we can with the patching. I’d like to schedule surgery to correct both of them.”

“Will this improve her vision, I mean, won’t that give her depth perception?” I’d heard from physical therapists that following surgeries for crossed eyes, kids often had big leaps in motor skills and coordination. I assumed this was due depth perception, which doesn’t develop when the eyes do not track in tandem.

“Yeah, well, she’ll have about a 25% chance of developing depth perception,” he said.

“Twenty-five percent? That’s pretty low!”

“I know. It’s only 50% in typical kids, no matter how young we operate. Sometimes it develops and sometimes it doesn’t but it’s half as likely with the Down syndrome. Still, you are going to see a big improvement in her vision. She’ll have a larger field of vision and things will make more sense to her.”

Eye Surgeries 3 & 4

The morning after her first birthday, both of Lyra’s eyes underwent muscle surgery to correct them from crossing. Knowing the operations were much less complicated than her lensectomies had been, I felt relaxed as we checked in at the hospital, visited amiably with the staff, Lyra’s surgeon and the anesthesiologist. But when the surgical nurse came to take Lyra from my arms, my throat felt strangled and once again Max and I held each other while watching a stranger walk down the hallway to the surgery suite with our now fifteen pound baby. Three bags of sugar and general anesthesia.

In the recovery room, I sucked my breath in when Lyra opened her eyes. With last year’s lensectomies, we couldn’t see the incisions because they were made on the backside of her eyes. But with the strabismus surgeries, red valleys rippled the once smooth, white surfaces between her nose and irises. The incisions looked like they had been made with a bread knife as the edges were not straight lines, but like the bric-a-brac trim stitched to the edge of Raggedy Ann’s apron.

For more than a week, Lyra’s eyes remained a gruesome sight, however, her vision improved immediately. A month later, Lyra does many things she didn’t do before, which we attribute to better vision. She suddenly developed “separation anxiety” and is no longer content being held by others when her father or I are nearby. She leans in our direction, looks at us and fusses while reaching for us with her arms. When playing on the floor, Lyra now raises her arms for me to pick her up whenever I am close to her. But she also sits for long periods of time playing with toys that are placed within her reach. She reaches farther ever day. And pivots more. Under the tutelage of physical therapists, we are teaching Lyra to go from sitting to lying down and vice versa. Crawling is coming.

When I have my contact lenses in, I can see very well. But if I cross one of my eyes (I can cross each of my eyes independently, impressing even Lyra’s ophthalmologist), where I should see one image I see two overlapping images. It’s terribly confusing, for which is the real item and which is the phantom double? Depth perception or not, seeing straight is certainly an improvement over seeing double.

The other thing, which may sound somewhat inappropriate, is Lyra looks better—the aspect of her face is surprisingly different with her eyes working in tandem. Is that because it is more normal? Perhaps. Do I love her any differently? Of course not.

What, More? More Lyra! At Least a Wee Bit More…

Before her hypothyroidism diagnosis, Lyra’s extremely slow growth rate was very concerning. She gained just two pounds in her first three months of life. So when Lyra had a growth spurt shortly after she began taking Synthroid, everyone was relieved and felt the problem was solved. However, at her 12-month well-baby visit, Lyra weighed 15 pounds even, only one pound more than she had three months earlier. Were she a typical baby, she’d have weighed almost 23 pounds by her first birthday as most babies grow two and a half times their weight in the first year and Lyra was seven pounds, ten ounces at birth.

“She’s slowing down again,” said Lyra’s pediatrician, Dr. M. “Her head measurement is really good, 75 percentile in the Down’s chart, but her height and weight have gone down in percentile since her 9-month visit.”

We talked about it. Lyra is still exclusively breastfed. Like many breastfed babies, my older boys all grew rapidly until they were about six months old. After that, they stopped putting on weight. Still, they also continued to grow in length, like pulled taffy I used to say. Lyra is not. In the end, Dr. M and I decided, well, nothing. As her brain size is not a concern, for now we’ll just keep monitoring the rest of Lyra’s growth.

Poop, Poop, Poop or The Miracle of Fruit-Eze™

WordPress lays an array of statistics in front of my eyes each day. Not only how many views I’ve had, but also the countries where Whoopsie Piggle has been read (over 40 so far, in all continents except Antarctica), and even the search terms used to find the site. Poop, it turns out, is pretty popular. Or, rather, searching for solutions to infant constipation is. Hundreds of hits on WP have been related to this issue.

At the National Down Syndrome Congress convention last July, Max and I attended a session led by the director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Down Syndrome Program on healthcare guidelines for children under the age of five. Constipation merited its own slide in her PowerPoint presentation, as it is such a common problem in the Down syndrome population where even at the cellular level, excretion is not as efficient as it is in the typical population. I once believed the underlying culprit for Lyra’s pernicious constipation was her hypothyroidism. But in a discussion with a scientist at the convention who was studying autoimmune disorders, I was told that even before she began pharmaceutical therapy, Lyra’s thyroid levels would not have caused her constipation. It seems the cause of Lyra’s constipation is simply her Down syndrome.

Given its pervasiveness, I’m surprised that more information is not readily available on how to address constipation without using laxatives. Many people with Down syndrome regularly take a product called Miralax, but it’s not considered safe for long-term use, something the Boston doctor mentioned in her talk. She then went on to tout the benefits of a diet high in fiber and an all-natural product called Fruit-Eze. (Yes, that’s purple and a link. If I could make lights blink around the name like an old-fashioned movie marquis, I would do that, too, I’m just so thrilled with this product.)

As far as I am concerned, that one tip merited all the exhausting travel and expense of attending last summer’s conference in Denver for I am here to sing the testimonial praises of Fruit-Eze. It is nothing more than a sweet jam of prunes, dates and raisins mixed with prune juice. Spread it on toast, mix it in baby food, eat it by the spoonful! Within days of giving Lyra two small spoonfuls in her food, one in the morning and one in the evening, we have been delightfully surprised to find stools in her diaper, sometimes twice daily! And no longer does she announcing their arrival with plaintive cries of pain because the poo is soft.

At $26 + shipping for a 32 ounce jar, Fruit-Eze is pricey, but well worth every penny. It is not at all hyperbole to say that Fruit-Eze has changed our lives.

The New Normal

A family of five children, the oldest is nineteen and the youngest is one. The oldest is off in his second year of college at the University of Michigan, living in a co-op where he cooks dinner once a week for 52 people and is learning how easy it is to cut the fingers of your left hand when chopping so many vegetables while back at home, the youngest complains as she cuts five teeth at once.

The second oldest continues to find romance as the primary inspiration for his song writing, which he practices All The Time on the sexy new guitar he purchased with the money he made over the summer at Old Carolina Barbeque, while his sister sits on the carpet next to him, mesmerized by all music, but especially the songs of her brother.

The third boy, so long the youngest, officially now the middle child, acts like a firstborn around his younger siblings, caring for them like a mini-me, his sister often found in his arms and most nights while I get dinner on, he feeds her, this boy who, like all mine do at 13, now grows as fast as corn on the white summer nights in Alaska, the fleeting traces of boyhood dissolving as he becomes lantern-jawed and long limbed like his older brothers and, just as they did at 13, this boy has stood up to his father and found, as did they, that there is no room in that relationship for any voices except one and now he must process why his father has abandoned him, too, when all he wanted was to be seen and heard, just like anyone else and it is all so much for a young man/boy but he is resilient, with brothers who guide him down the path they each traveled not long ago.

The last boy is also off to school, going all five days to the Waldorf school and he tells us he loves his sister, he loves her, he loves her and he can’t stop taking her ears in his hands and squeezing them even though we’ve told him so many times to Never Touch Her Ears and even though doing so means his sister can reach his long hair and pull it, which she always does because she loves pulling hair, especially her brother’s hair because he screams when she does and she has him right there in her lap, he doesn’t move lest she pull harder but he screams until someone extricates her fingers from his flaxen locks, which his dada refuses to cut because it is like a golden halo that floats around his face as he runs, runs, runs in the park-like yard, taking his pants down to pee in the grass, throwing dirt in the fish pond, digging in the sandbox, spraying everyone who comes close with the hose and when he falls asleep his muscles lose all tension and his head sweats just like the music brother’s head did when he was a boy, the music brother who announced when the littlest brother was still in the womb that “he will be like me and I shall raise him in my own image and I will call him Leif” and it was so.

Just a Child

I have a friend whose mother is from Japan. My friend once told me she did not hear her mother’s accent, which I thought was quite pronounced. Oh, she knew her mother had an accent. But in daily life, her mother is her mother, not her Japanese mother, whose voice she has listened to since the nautical days of earliest life.

We are always aware that Lyra has Down syndrome. We see it in her eyes and the manner in which she develops. But Lyra is no more our Down syndrome daughter than my friend’s mother is her Japanese mother; she is simply our daughter. Our fifth child. Her brothers’ sister. Who happens to live in the rich milieu that is this family, that is Whoopsie Piggle.

Lyra’s Latest: Baby Doll to Baby

June 27, 2013June 28, 2013 whoopsiepiggle1 Comment

She Awakens

“What’s the word you just used?” I asked Lyra’s ophthalmologist.

“Myelinate. It’s a coating over the nerves, just like that wire down there,” he said pointing to the floor where a thick cable traveled a short distance from the exam chair I was sitting in, holding Lyra in my lap, to the wall where it was plugged into an outlet. “Because those wires are insulated, currents travel faster than if they were not. Our nerves are the same and children with Down syndrome tend to myelinate a little later than other kids.”

Like her pediatrician, Lyra’s eye surgeon is incredibly smart. He observably delights in answering questions and, if we are discussing eyes and not nerves, he often dashes over to a poster on the wall that illustrates the anatomy of the human eye. At her last visit, I shared with him how she had changed since beginning treatment for hypothyroidism in early April. It’s not that she seems more intelligent, but rather she’s more alert and awake. A leader in a Ds support group told me that “our babies” tend to wake up at around nine months, but she was not sure why. Learning why from the ophthalmologist reminds me that I cannot rely on any one source—be it a book, website, support group or even a doctor who specializes in Ds—to fully inform me. I need to continually synthesize all the resources available to us, the parents of a child with Ds.

And I see the beginning of a lifelong pattern of questioning whether or not something is the direct result of Lyra’s Ds. Earlier, I had asked if she refused a bottle because of the hypotonia attendant to Ds. Because she is a champ at breastfeeding, which requires more muscle strength than drinking from a bottle, I believe Lyra’s rejection of bottles is purely personality and not due to any Ds related hypotonia. Now, we’ve learned, her new vivaciousness is attributable to her Ds and not her pharmacological treatment for her thyroid issues.

She Grows

Because they are generally smaller than typical children, doctors use a growth chart specifically designed for children with Ds. At an appointment in late March, just a week before she began taking Synthroid for her hypothyroidism, Lyra was 24 inches tall, which put her in the 20^th percentile for children with Ds. After two months on Synthroid, she was 26 inches tall, putting her in the 50^th percentile for kids with Ds. She has gained nearly two pounds and now weighs a little more than 14 pounds. That keeps her where she was at in March, in the 30^th percentile for weight, but, again, that may not be caused by anything atypical. Though she eats food, Lyra is exclusively breastfed and after six months of age, breastfed babies tend to gain weight more slowly than formula fed babies. This was true with all of my boys whom I used to joke about being on some virtual taffy-pulling machine—they’d grow taller and taller and taller without any commensurate weight gain. At nineteen Claude is still a lean drink of water, weighing in at 160 pounds on his 6’2” frame.

Lyra dresses up and grabs Claude's attention — Lyra dresses up and grabs Claude’s attention

For several months, Lyra wore clothes sized for the average three-month-old. She grew, but so incrementally as to be stalled out at size three months. Most babies triple in weight their first year and darling outfits easily become hand-me-downs after only one or two wearings, size three months being a brief weigh station on a quick journey to size twelve months. Or so it had been with all four boys when they were babies. With Lyra, I grew downright sick of dressing her in the same limited collection of clothes. In May, I went out and bought her some new things sized 3-6 months—they fit but with room for growth. After all, she is my only girl and part of the fun is the pretty clothes. Now, at ten months old and after three months of taking Synthroid, I can finally dress Lyra in the size six months clothes I’ve been longing for her to grow into.

She’s Strong(er)

The delays aren’t as noticeable the first year because babyhood milestones have broad acceptable quantifiers of acquisition. You’ll notice more delays in the second year of life. ~A physical therapist from the county who evaluated Lyra at six weeks of age.

Lyra's favorite teething tool — Lyra’s favorite teething tool

It’s been a long time since someone has asked me if Lyra is a baby doll or a real baby (see“Lyra’s Latest: Wee Teeny Peanut”). Not only is she bigger, she’s more active and wiggles in my arms rather than inactively reposing like a dolly. Recently, I began carrying Lyra like a proper baby—on my left hip. Though she does not yet sit up on the floor without assistance, she does sit upright in my arms (and in her bouncy seat, and her Bumbo, and next to anyone who sits with her on the couch). She hangs on to my clothes and, when she can reach it, pulls a silver pendant I often wear into her mouth, biting the cool metal to soothe her toothless gums. She also grabs for our glasses—Jules and Leif are the only people in the house who don’t wear them. Hugo often lets her succeed and she thanks him by coating his spectacles with drool.

Lyra working with her physical therapist

Crawling is a four-point system of knees and hands. In Lyra’s physical therapy, we’ve focused on breaking down the components of front and back. When she’s on her belly, we gently encourage her to put weight on her arms. We also take turns sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lyra in the center of our laps. As she leans over a thigh to play with toys set out for her, we bend her legs and make her knees bear weight. We’ve been doing this since April after she mastered rolling over.

At the home daycare both Leif and Lyra attend there are two baby boys just a few weeks older than our girl. At the beginning of the year, I observed these boys rising up on their arms, later finding their knees, rocking on all fours, and eventually crawling. They now stand, albeit briefly, on their own before kerfloping back down on their diaper-cushioned bottoms. Soon they will be walking. It’s hard not to compare. Impossible, really.

And so we were thrilled when, three weeks ago, Lyra began lifting herself up on her arms, both with her elbows bent and with them locked. We continue to cheer for her whenever we see her lift up, doing her baby workout. Come on, peanut, give me five push-ups, lift, lift, lift! Sooo big! Big girl! That’s right! Yay, Lyra, yay!!!

She Claps

At Lyra’s nine-month-old visit with her pediatrician, Dr. M asked me if Lyra was picking up pieces of cereal with her forefinger and thumb yet. “No, but she grabs them with her whole hand,” I told her. Not good enough. Lyra will be evaluated by an occupational therapist next week. Perhaps we are not objective on this count because she seems fine to us, regularly grabbing at things she wants, like my necklace or our glasses. When seated in her Bumbo, we have to clear an 18 inch circle around Lyra. This is because she will suddenly pivot in unpredictable directions and dart her hands to grab at whatever she sees—a glass bowl filled with apples, half full cups of hot coffee, sharp knives. Okay, no knives, but you get the point, if it’s there, Lyra’s liable to grab it. And really, that’s comforting on many levels. First of all, she’s seeing. She’s then processing the information and thinking (I imagine) gimme that! And, finally, she is successfully directing her hand to grab what she sees and wants.

Erupting from our house this past month are sounds like those from a stadium full of hometown fans watching their team win the championship. Lyra is given robust rounds of cheers when she lifts up on her arms. Her brother, Leif, has gotten many too as he has moved from diapers to underwear, even at night. Last week, Lyra decided to cheer too. If anyone says, “Yay!” Lyra lays open a knowing grin and with her fingers wide apart, she closely watches as her two hands and come together again and again. And we cheer again because it’s mighty cute.

She Poops. Pellets. Occasionally.

One of the many symptoms of hypothyroidism is constipation. And so I was quite hopeful that after Lyra had been on her medication for a few weeks, she would resume having soft and regular bowel movements. Things did seem to improve at first, and then they went back to the hard, black stools, produced every three to five days, which remind me of owl pellets found in the woods. But owls are carnivores while Lyra eats fruits, vegetables, oat cereal and fish when we have it; all of which she washes down with breastmilk. In other words, a diet that should keep things soft and regular.

I know Lyra’s cries better than I recall knowing those of my other babies. She grunts and squawks when she’s hungry but when she’s tired she whines and yells out. When she’s pooping, she hisses out a breathy scream of pain. I quickly move to open her diaper because her clay hard stools get wedged against her diaper. They can back up in her bottom if I don’t take her diaper off.

Recently a friend of ours recommended a homeopathic remedy. When chosen correctly, I’ve seen homeopathic remedies arrest illnesses with such remarkable speed it’s as though someone waved a magic wand. Which remedy to take is determined by what might otherwise seem like an odd assortment of questions. Seated next to me while I was nursing Lyra, my friend noticed Lyra’s head glistening with perspiration and asked, “Does she always sweat when she nurses?” She does. “Does she have trouble with constipation?” Oh, yeah. “Have her try a dose of calc carb, you can get it at the Mustard Seed.”

I bought the remedy a few days later. The information at the store said it helped cradle cap, the waxy debris that forms on the scalps of many babies. Lyra has that too. I gave her a dose two weeks ago. I gave her another one last week. The other night I was abruptly awakened by Lyra’s aspirant cries. “Turn on the light,” I told Max as I grabbed her from the crib next to my side of the bed. I peeled off Lyra’s jammies and cracked open her diaper. A ball of poo rolled forward in her open diaper, leaving no trail. Lyra sobbed as one does after a physical trial and I held her naked in my arms until she was calm.

I’m at a loss for what to try next. I’ve resisted stool softeners as they are not without side effects, but feel I may need to reconsider that decision if pooping does not become a less painful ordeal for Lyra. Whenever I am sure there is no other recourse, she has a couple of softer, less painful movements. And I again hesitate to interfere with I hope is a long, and nearly complete, process towards regulating.

She Sees

When I pick Lyra up at daycare, I immediately nurse her. She sits in my arms and looks into my eyes, her left eye crossed in slightly, but both seeing me. She reaches up for my hair as I talk to her. When she finishes nursing and is seated in my lap, she repeatedly tilts her head back to look up at me while I talk to Jenny, her daycare provider.

“There is nothing your daughter will not be able to do because of her vision,” the eye surgeon told me several months ago. Last month, he wanted to put Lyra under general anesthesia to conduct a full exam of her eyes. It still takes three of us in his office to change her contact lenses, so examining the interior of her eyes when she is awake is not really an option.

They cancelled the examination, which is treated like surgery, when her blood work came back. After seven weeks on Synthroid, Lyra went from having too much TSH to not enough. The endocrinologist cut her dosage in half and we will test her blood again in July. If she has reached “therapeutic levels” of TSH, her eye surgeon will examine her eyes in August. The postponment of the initial exam under anesthesia was a blessing because the ophthalmologist has since decided that it is time to tighten Lyra’s eye muscles to correct her crossed eyes. Delaying the first proceedure means one less time Lyra has to undergo general anesthesia.

Long ago, in our first visit with her, Dr. M (whose daughter also has Ds) told us about our kids taking hits to the brain. “They have Ds, that’s a hit. If they develop anemia, that’s another hit. Then, if they have open heart surgery, they take another hit.” I asked her if their brains recover from the hit of open heart surgery. “No, the same is true with adults. There’s something about the reduction of pressure during surgery.” I don’t know if the brain takes a hit when undergoing general anesthesia, but it seems to me that it is something best avoided except when absolutely necessary.

As for her crossed eyes, it’ll be good to have them corrected and she’ll have better depth perception, if not overall vision, when they are tracking in tandem. I’ve often wondered which I eye I should look into when talking to someone with crossed eyes, as it’s impossible to keep my two tracking eyes on two different focal points. I don’t have that problem with Lyra and I cannot tell you why. As kitschy as it sounds, I think it’s because when I look at her, I see her with the love I have for her and my brain doesn’t have a chance to natter at me about which eye I should look at. I see my girl. Or my “sweetness” as Jenny calls her.

The Child I Most Needed to Mother

When I was five months pregnant with Lyra, I went to see an astrologer. It was not the first time I had met with this woman, who lives three hours away in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In 1997, Hugo was a colicky baby who cried in my arms while the astrologer, whose name is Lynn, described the meaning of all the various planets in my birth chart. Saturn in this house, the moon in that house, this aspect rising, another descending. Since that time, I have seen her every so often, sometimes after many years, for what is called a “progressive” or where things are now in my chart.

Without going into whether astrology is real or hockum, I recognize that belief systems have long intrigued me. So much so that my primary undergraduate degree is in religious studies. Personally, I don’t put much value in absolute truths, because they are absolutely subjective. I will say that each of my readings with Lynn have resonated in unanticipated ways.

“Your intuitive connection with this baby will be stronger than with any of your other children,” she told me as I sat full bellied in her consulting room. “As a result, this child will know when you are bullshitting and will tell you so. You will not be able to fool her, but she will read and know you with great empathy. Because of this bond, she will be a harder child to leave. Don’t be shocked if you find it hard to send her to daycare so you can go back to work fulltime.

I didn’t ask Lynn any questions about my baby, but she kept returning to her. Nor did I know that the baby I was carrying had Down syndrome, in fact, I’d been told otherwise. And yet Lynn’s description of the baby growing in my womb fit the description of a child with Ds in many ways.

“Because your moon is in Neptune, there is an interesting aspect to this baby. She will be deeply empathetic and so open that you should be cautious of who you let hold her. Do not pass her to someone she does not want to go to.”

After circling back time and again to talk about the baby during my hour long appointment with her, Lynn returned one more time as she ended our session:

“This is the child you most need to mother. Listen, I’m not saying she most needs you, but you most need her. There is more for you in this child, a deeper meaning in being her mother.” And then, almost as an afterthought, she threw out there, “Oh, and expect some sort of giftedness in this child, she’ll be musical or artistic.”

Signs Posted

When the boys were little, I posted quotes in places where they would have no choice but to read them. The best spot is next to the toilet. Often, I would take discarded watercolor paper the boys had painted with pastel colors at the Waldorf school. I would cut the paper into shapes, flowers or just round-edged rectangles, and then I would sit down and slowly copy a quote that had struck me, such as one from Marcus Aurelius:

When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive: to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Or a passage from a book like The Arabian Nights:

A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.

Other times, I would just pin cards to the wall or cut out quotes from the newspaper and tape them up. Of them all, what the boys committed most deeply to memory, and for years have frequently cited, is a small line from a long list of famous things Ben Franklin is purported to have said: Beer is a sign that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Over time, and particularly when moving to the new house, these scraps of sayings have disappeared. Of all the ones I penned on watercolor so many years ago, the one I think of most often was an abridged quote from the Indiana lawyer-poet, Max Ehrmann:

You are a child of the universe…And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Lyra's Latests · Uncategorized

Lyra’s Latest: Where’s the Poop?

April 17, 2013July 6, 2014 whoopsiepiggle2 Comments

Prescript: In July of 2013 we learned about Fruit-Eze. A jam-like product made entirely of fruit, it worked wonders on the constipation that routinely flared up even after Lyra began taking Synethroid. She has a tablespoon each and every morning. Available online, Fruit-Eze is nothing short of miraculous.

Warning: As the title indicates, or so I believe, expect baby poo descriptions in this piece. Squeamish Readers, please proceed with caution.

Constipation Fixation

“It could be her thyroid,” said Dr. M at Lyra’s six-month check up. “It’s standard of care for Down syndrome to check it now anyway.” I was at Lyra’s six-month check up and, just as I had at her five-month check up, I explained to Dr. M that iron supplements had constipated Lyra. What I hadn’t told Dr. M was that ten days after we started giving Lyra the multivitamins with iron, we had stopped. Dr. M very strongly recommended giving Lyra an iron supplement but Lyra’s cereal has just as much iron in it as the vitamins. Thus, I didn’t see any reason to continue dosing her with the vitamins when I just knew they had caused Lyra’s unrelenting constipation.

Here’s what I know about constipation: If you have it, the only people you might tell is your significant other or your doctor. Then again, you might not. But if it is your baby who is constipated, that little person’s bowel movements will consume your thinking, day after day, and you will talk about it to anyone who will listen. Nearly all else in your life becomes less important than your baby’s bowels. It isn’t even necessary to document when the baby pooped last. You know the date like you know your own birthday. And this is because a constipated baby is generally a very sad baby. The term “colicky” isn’t about temperment, but describes a baby who has irregular digestion and is pretty grumpy about it.

I learned all about this back in the 90s with my Hugo, whose birth was by far my most difficult. Weighing in at 10 pounds and with a chest circumference that was larger than that of his big head, we called him “Huge-o” for several months. He also got stuck on his way out of the womb. After I had delivered what seemed like his soccer ball-sized head, the midwives realized he had shoulder dystocia and while I puffed like a locomotive going up a steep hill, the midwives safely repositioned him. It took a while, but he came out just fine. A couple of days later, however, I developed a nasty uterine infection and was put on Augmentin, a big-gun antibiotic. It cured my infection but, through my breast milk, it also trashed Hugo’s digestive tract. He cried nearly every waking moment for the next five months. Born in late November, I drove him in the car on bumpy roads to soothe him. If he fell asleep, I pulled into parking lots, parked and, with the car running, worked on crossword puzzles. Three-year-old Claude, in the seat next to Baby Hugo, was under strict orders of silence if the baby fell asleep. Though more often than not, Claude also nodded off after a long drive to nowhere in an overly heated car.

Hugo cried because he hurt. He would go nine to twelve days without a bowel movement. I felt über-environmental—using cloth diapers was a breeze with Hugo; rarely was there any messy clean up. Just weeks of easy-to-wash, low-odor, pee-pee diapers. When he did go, however, Hugo blew like a volcano. Between the volume and the force with which he expelled it, I would often first spy Hugo’s poo at the nape of his neck, just above his collar. Everything would have to come off and at least twice, when strolling him on the tile floor of the Lane Avenue Mall in Columbus, I had to dash into Baby Gap to buy him clean clothes (you would think I kept an outfit on hand, but since it was so rarely needed, I would get lulled into lugging very little gear).

Hugo eventually normalized, but I recall those early days with an element of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It may sound like I’m joking, but I’m not. For months, Hugo’s shrieks of pain and subsequent nursing frequently punctuated what little sleep I got. During the days, I could not accomplish much of anything other than trying to calm him, which meant holding him around the clock or driving him on bumpy roads. I have heard that psychologists compare a lengthy episode of parenting a colicky baby with torture, and I believe it. With the pregnancies of every child after Hugo, I prayed for anything but another colicky baby.

Lyra, like all my other babies except Hugo, quickly and regularly produced the kind of lovely poos that babies who are exclusively fed breast milk produce. The color of Dijon mustard, they smelled yogurty, and she produced them two to three times a day. That is, until we gave her the vitamins that included iron. And then, snap, she just stopped going. After five days, I gave her a pediatric suppository and what came out was dark and tar-like. Damn iron I thought. After ten days on the vitamins, we stopped and figured that in a week her stools would once again be mustardy and regular. But that didn’t happen. We began working with her diet, first giving her prunes to eat, then, a few weeks later, switching her cereal from rice (which can be binding) to oatmeal. And we began giving her a daily dose of algal DHA because it is good for brain development. It is also oily and should help move things along. We regularly massage her belly and her day care provider gives her Reiki treatments. She has never been fed formula, which also can bind, but exclusively drinks breast milk.

All to no avail.

Instead, Lyra’s weekly bowel movements have become heart-breaking spectacles, which the whole family often attends. After several days without a stool, Lyra’s abdomen tightens like a rock slab as she fusses inconsolably. Rarely does Lyra pass the stool on her own now and she has become what I call “Our Little ATM.” I pop in a small glycerin suppository and in return, Lyra strains and pushes out black pellets. We hold her legs and massage her tummy and her brothers coo to her soothingly, while she wails with pain and sometimes, just before a hard pellet of poo erupts, droplets of blood seep through her anus. The only comfort for us is how quickly Lyra settles after everything’s passed. Then five days later, it starts all over again.

Dr. M Scores Again

The reason Dr. M insists Lyra take iron is because anemia, or iron deficiency, reduces the oxygen getting to the brain. And a brain getting less oxygen risks a drop in IQ and with Lyra’s Ds, it is imperative to avoid additional hits to her IQ.

At first blush, it may seem that I am anti-medical. I had all of my children at home. Until Lyra, I never participated in the American Academy of Pediatrics schedule for well-baby visits. I’m not interested in taking a healthy baby to see the doctor. And also, I don’t follow the AAP’s vaccination schedule, as I mentioned in “Finding a Pediatrician, or The Continuum of Jewish Women.”

But I am not anti-medical. In fact, I am deeply appreciative of modern medicine and all that it can do. Had Claude been born 50 years earlier, he likely would have died of dehydration by his first birthday, which was a common cause of childhood death prior to the 1950s when IVs became widely available. Claude had a vomiting virus and in less than 24 hours had shriveled up. The skin on his stomach stayed wrinkled like a raisin’s after a doctor pinched and released a one-inch section between her forefinger and thumb. Claude was rushed to the emergency room and given fluids intravenously.

Had I given birth to Hugo 75 years earlier, I might have died from my uterine infection, as antibiotics only became available in 1935. And certainly, had Lyra been born just a handful of decades ago, her cataracts would not have been surgically removed and she would have been blind.

But I find that the medical professions are often in the position, whether or not providers like it, of treating the symptoms of illness without effectively addressing the underlying causes. We observed an example of this when Lyra had her eye surgeries. Both times as we waited for Lyra to awaken in the post-op recovery room, most of the other patients were recovering from tonsillectomies. The cries of these children were as raw as the pain in their throats.

“I thought they didn’t do many tonsillectomies anymore,” I said to the nurse attending Lyra after her second surgery.

“Oh, no, they have been on the rise. It’s the bulk of what we see in here,” she said and when I asked why, she told me, “It’s sleep apnea. So many children are heavy now and they develop sleep apnea.

“So they take out their tonsils?” I asked.

“Yep,” she answered.

It shocks me that children should undergo surgery, which is hardly without risks, for something that is correctable with diet. But physicians have little to no ability to change what is likely an entire family’s eating habits in order to get one child to lose enough weight to resolve that child’s sleep apnea. So they quickly fix the symptom by surgically opening the airways with tonsillectomies.

That is not how I live. When my children or I have a health concern, I consider what might be the source of the issue and seek to resolve it. For example, Jules has had unremitting nasal drainage all this school year. I could just give him antihistamines, which I have now and again when he couldn’t sleep. But as the problem appeared systemic, I have worked with him to clear out sugar, wheat and dairy from his diet to see if that helps. Two weeks later, he stopped complaining of drainage.

And this is why we have not treated Lyra’s constipation with laxatives, which would only further decrease her body’s ability to properly process and eliminate her stools. Her constipation, as horrible as it is, is not her problem but rather the symptom of a bigger problem.

Hypothyroidism

In the case of Lyra and her constipation, it seems the introduction of iron was simply an unrelated factor, even though the timing suggested otherwise. As it turns out, the blood tests confirmed that Lyra has developed hypothyroidism. Her actual thyroid levels were fine. But the thyroid gland is the lackey of the pituitary gland. Like a shift supervisor at a factory, the pituitary gland monitors the thyroid gland’s output and responds by secreting something called TSH. TSH tells the thyroid gland how hard to work. When it wants the thyroid gland to work harder, the pituitary gland sends out more TSH. In Lyra’s case, her pituitary gland was making, according to some charts, twice as much TSH as is normal in order to get her thyroid gland to produce the proper amount of thyroid.

We were referred to the Endocrinology Center at Akron Children’s Hospital where I asked, just to be sure, that they retest Lyra’s blood. They found the same results as Dr. M’s lab. We were seen by a nurse practitioner who, after having me describe Lyra’s symptoms, asked if anyone else in the family had suffered from constipation. I told her about Baby Hugo and she said, “Oh, I tell parents it’s not so much how often they go, but what the consistency is. If we have mashed potato stools, it’s okay, but the hard pellets are not.” Had I known that sixteen years ago!

On April sixth, we began giving Synthroid, a synthetic thyroid replacement drug, to Lyra. At first, we smashed a tiny pill between two spoons, mixed the resultant powder in a cup with a teaspoon or so of breast milk, drew it up in an oral syringe and gave it to her. On April seventh, our clever girl began blowing raspberries when she felt the plastic syringe touch her mouth. Between what she sputtered out of her mouth and the reality that some of the powder remained in both the cup and the syringe, we weren’t sure how much of her dose she was actually getting.

Lyra looking like a big girl next to her newborn buddy, Cora.

Beginning this week, I now slide the small pill down her throat with my finger and promptly nurse her. She gagged a little the first time, but hasn’t since. We know she has the full dose in her body and once she’s been on the Synthroid for six weeks, we will have her blood tested again. After that, we get to visit the Endocrinology Center every three months until Lyra is four or five years old. It is quite likely that Lyra will need to take some form of thyroid replacement her entire life. I am just glad we caught it so soon, since thyroid can affect so much, including many things that are already concerns for people with Down syndrome.

For now, we are looking for softer stools, however often they pass. And perhaps, too, our wee teeny peanut will get a little bigger.

Update, April 21, 2013:

“You want to smell something wonderful?” I asked Max this afternoon, before sticking Lyra’s behind in his face. He was working at his desk in his home office when I brought Lyra in from the minivan after returning from Jules’ track meet. As soon as I’d plucked her from her car seat, I’d smelled it: pungent, breastmilk poo.

Sure enough, when I opened Lyra’s diaper a few minutes after making Max sniff her derriere, I was greeted by the lovely site of an oh-so-typical poo. That is, typical for a baby who is exclusively breastfed–mustardy orange with a butyeric odor, kind of like movie theater popcorn–who isn’t suffering from hypothyroidism.

Fifteen days after she began taking thyroid replacement drugs, our girl has regulated. The days of rock hard pellets are behind us, or so I pray.