Light Weight

I haven't talked about this much on the blog but Caden is very small. He was on the small side when he was born, although not extremely tiny. But he had a pretty rocky start and didn't get much of a chance to eat or put on any weight early on. He was pretty much the same size at 2 months old as he was the day he was born if that tells you anything. But even at the age of 2, most people are very surprised when I tell them how old he is. He definitely looks more like a 12-month-old than a 27-month-old.

In January of last year when we transitioned Caden to a blenderized diet (BD) of whole foods vs. the canned infant formula the doctor prescribed, there was a lot of concern that he wouldn't be able to gain weight. I proved them wrong very quickly as Caden did phenomenally on BD. All his doctors and therapists the dietitians we were working with all noticed HUGE improvements in his appearance and his growth. He was doing amazing! But he was still small. However, doctors weren't overly concerned as long as he was following his own growth curve and was consistent.

Fast forward to February of this year... Early in February we had our regular 6-month check up with Dr. Van Gundy, Caden's cardiologist. He noticed that Caden hadn't gained much weight or grown much in height since last fall. He was concerned but said he wanted us to continue to monitor it and hopefully it would turn around soon. He wanted us to follow up with him in another 6 weeks or so to see if he was gaining weight.

Then we saw the GI doctor the week after that and she was VERY concerned about not only his weight, but his weight-to-height ratio because that is the real number she was concerned with. He had been 30th percentile for weight-to-height when we saw her in October, but at this visit he was down to 17th percentile and she didn't like that trend. She was worried that if he kept falling off that curve, things could get serious.

So, she recommended we add a zinc supplement to his diet. We are mostly vegan and Caden is entirely vegan and her opinion is that all vegetarians are zinc deficient. She said she has seen kids grow simply by adding zinc into their diet. I was certainly willing to try that because the alternative is they would start pushing us to put him back on formula (not that I would agree to it, but it would be a battle and I didn't really want to have to fight) or add in BeneCalorie or something like that. So we set up a follow up with her for 2 months to see where he was at by then.

In the meantime, we continued to get bi-weekly weight checks at the cardiologist's office to monitor his weight for our intensive feeding therapy program. We knew we needed to see some positive results in order to satisfy doctors so we added a little bit of volume to his tube feedings. And, at the same time, the feeding therapist was able to increase his volume orally so his overall intake and calorie consumption increased.

The GI doc had prescribed a very specific form of zinc and we couldn't find it to save our lives. So we ended up calling her office and asking if another kind would be okay. By the time she approved that and we finally started it, that was only 3 weeks ago and only 1 week before we saw the cardiologist for our follow up.

I have to give you the statistics here:
Weight on 2/8/11: 22 lb, 0 oz
Weight on 3/1/11: 22 lb, 12 oz
Weight on 3/22/11: 22 lb, 9 oz
Started zinc on 3/22/11
Weight on 3/31/11 (9 days later!): 24 lb, 3 oz!!!

Is it possible that after taking zinc for only 1 week that his weight would increase by over a pound and a half??? Or is it pure coincidence? After all, we made the other volume/calorie increases much earlier and he had only gained a net total of 9 oz in 7 weeks! Then in 1 week, he gains that much!!! It's crazy but I'm thrilled.

I love this pic of Caden and Dr. Van Gundy looking at each other. So sweet!


When the cardiologist saw the weight, he basically said he wasn't concerned anymore as Caden was back on the growth curve (6th percentile for weight). :) And if he maintained that he would be fine with it.

We just had our follow-up with the GI doc this week and she was thrilled to say the least! She couldn't believe how much better he was doing. His weight-to-height ratio is back up to 39th percentile and she is really happy about that.

Yay, no more doctors breathing down our necks. But if you could all keep praying for Caden to continue to gain weight and do well that would be great. The hard part right now is if we have to maintain or even increase the amount of food he gets via his tube, he will not be interested in eating more orally and we will never get him off the g-tube. It feels like we are stuck in a catch 22 situation and can't win. We have to get him to gain weight and currently that means he has to have both forms of meals. For now, things are good and for that I am praising God.