Tuesday 20 September 2011

M is for midget

So I spoke to the GP about M's weight.

Actually, that's a lie. I sent the GP a text that said "I'm a bit worried about M. I can't get an appointment with you for a week.  Fancy coming round here, so that I can cook your children lunch and you can inspect  my baby?"

And he said "Yes, how about Sunday?".

Sometimes I love living in a very small town.

Anyway, they all came round (his wife is also a GP), and poked at M, who smiled obligingly and looked thoroughly healthy, and we agreed that there was nothing obvious wrong, and that maybe we should come in to the surgery to have M checked out properly for the scarily vague Failure to Thrive.

Which we did, last Thursday. M was weighed and measured and prodded and listened to, and turned upside down and tickled, and had put on 8 ounces in just over a week.

Which still doesn't make him huge, but does put him back on the scale (at the 0.4th centile rather than just under it).  More importantly his head circumference is still where it was at birth (75th centile - it's all those brains), and so is his length (25th).  The GP and I went through the list of possible causes of Failure to Thrive (I feel it needs capitals) and none of them seemed to apply, so we are left where we were.

With a small baby.  Whom I am to feed a bit more often.*

He's still not weed on me though.


*That bit obviously because one is not allowed to leave a health professional's office without having added to the layers of maternal guilt...It's one of the NHS's founding principles.

10 comments:

  1. Maybe he will just grow all of a sudden! perhaps you need a grow bag for him

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  2. The problem is that I have been embargoed from using the grow bags by my daughters on the grounds that they are pink....

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  3. am glad that all is well and that you can carry on doing what you are doing - being a mummy to a beautiful little boy who will look gorgeous in pink grobags and muddy in grow bags!!!

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  4. Need boy clothes? I can send you boy clothes. I am not short on boy clothes. And I am looking at a (very fetching) 0-6 month blue checked grobag which you can have. Or you can put him in pink which is what happened to Adam when his female cousin passed on a lot of her very pink stuff.

    So he hasn't weed on you yet? He's just doing that lulling you into a false sense of security and waiting for the perfect moment (when you are all dressed up for your first night out in eons - for example) before letting whoosh.

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  5. Grrrrr to them still having a little thing that makes you feel bad - hopefully having had him checked out will help you feel more secure about it all

    Hang on in there and remember there's a distribution chart because they come in a whole range of sizes (I struggle that Bigger is 98% centile and Littler is right at the other end of the scale)

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  6. Can you really be failing to thrive if you're doing pretty well in the head and length department??

    I have a possible solution for you: leave him next to an open tube of Pringles. By the next day he'll be on the 95th centile. I have proof: I seem to have put on all sorts of ounces since yesterday, though I'd rather not specify my centile increase....

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  7. I definitely don't want to be one of those people who weigh in with endless advice and "it's all about me"-isms, but...my son was also underweight. Badly. As in, fall of the scale and even got labelled with the Failure to Thrive. It turns out it was because he couldn't eat enough, once we got him the "controlled drowning" nipples and introduced solids (at what I thought was way too young an age, but he was so very tiny) then he caught up.

    It took a while.

    Much fretting was had.

    You're not alone.x

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  8. someone's always at the top and someones always at the bottom and just look at little Paul Daniels with the lovely Debbie McGee...actually that comment really isn't going to help is it.. I'll get me coat....

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  9. LLC born on the 50th percentile, lost weight and then was consistently between the 0.4th and 2nd percentile lines...but she met all her milestones and I always felt she was fine, although the HV I used to see gave me doubts. Now at 20 months she is still quite small and eats like a horse. I took her to the GP the MV's suggestion but he never saw an issue. Argh it is so frustrating that most health professionals can't look at children in their own right rather than as a dot on a chart.

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  10. UPDATE: As of this pm M is 5.01kg. A gain of 101g in six days. Still hovering above the 0.4 centile and, other than a snotty nose and a gammy eye (he's still lovely though), still fine... In fact he's currently asleep on me after a big old feed, which is lovely but makes typing tricky. Individual replies to follow when I have my other hand back...

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I know. I'm sorry. I hate these word recognition, are you a robot, guff things too, but having just got rid of a large number of ungrammatical and poorly spelt adverts for all sorts of things I don't want, and especially don't want on my blog, I'm hoping that this will mean that only lovely people, of the actually a person variety, will comment.

So please do. Comments are great...