Communication Breakdown

About a week and a half ago Charlie's reflux started acting up. I've been extremely proud of all the progress we've made in this area--Charlie takes no medications for reflux any more. We keep things in check by limiting his dairy intake and giving him a natural herb called Slippery Elm that helps to heal the digestive tract. ABR has helped too, but I'll stay off the soap box for today.

When Charlie starts refluxing these days, it usually means that he's gotten some type of cold or other illness and in general his body just doesn't seem to work as well in these situations.

My first hint that something is amiss is that he'll start biting his forearm. I have no idea what the correlation is, but for some reason he bites his forearm when he's refluxing. If it goes on for a couple of days then he'll have a circular bruise on his upper arm from all the bites.

So about a week and half ago he starts with the arm biting and I assume he's picked up cold. His PT comes and as soon as we get him into standing, he refluxes exorcist-style. It was so bad that I cancelled our Feldenkrais appointment and took him in to see the pediatrician. Other than some weight gain (hooray!), nothing of any consequence was discovered.

So the reflux continued and I still had no idea what was causing it. I just kept thinking that it would run its course.

This morning, after nine days of reflux, it finally occurred to me to ask my husband if Charlie had been getting his usual morning dose of Slippery Elm. Hubby is very good about these things--that's part of the reason why he's in charge of them--so I had assumed that everything was OK in this department. Imagine my surprise when he said, "yeah, I've been meaning to bring that up--we've been out for a while."

Good. Lord.

Here I am, making appointments, making assumptions, having lousy therapy appointments, playing House, and all the while the answer to the reflux mystery was right in front of me.

Assumptions--they'll be the death of me yet.