Our Baby News

Doctor for Babies:

It’s hard not to worry about your baby’s health. Even if your baby is the picture of health, your little one is just so small and vulnerable, right? So how

Baby Fever

do you know when something is wrong?

According to the Mayo Clinic, parents should always trust their instincts. After all, no one knows your baby better than you – so call the doctor if something doesn’t seem right. Here are the main areas to keep tabs on:

Temperament

“There’s nothing wrong with a crying baby,” says John Peters, a pediatrician based in San Francisco. “If the baby is active and seems to have a normal balance of happiness and crying, he’s probably not sick.”

When should we see the doctor?

Some health problems need to be checked out straight away by your doctor, while others can be left for a few hours or so.

Newborn baby care involves helping your baby whenever he is sick, you should call the doctor immediately. Note that even though some of certain illnesses appear to be mild, they can be a sign of serious disorder.

Here is the list of possible symptoms that your newborn may encounter during his or her early age: 

• Poor feeding
• Loss of consciousness
• Hysterical crying or unusual excitement
• High fever
• Extreme sleepiness
• Paralysis of any part of the body
• Extreme chilling
• Sudden loss of hearing
• Earache
• Discharge of fluid from the ear
• Severe headache
• Convulsion
• Sudden weakness
• Discolored and bad-smelling nasal fluid
• Diarrhea
• Poor coloring
• Vomiting

There may be more complications with a twin pregnancy than a singleton; the mother may suffer more nausea and vomiting, and may be more anaemic as her babies make more demands on her resources, and she may be more likely to develop preeclampsia.

Obviously a multiple pregnancy is a little more risky than a single one, but as long as the mother attends her clinic regularly and follows the advice she is given the risk is small.

Actual labor, despite the horrific tales some women delight in telling, is not necessarily longer or more uncomfortable than for a single baby, though clearly the midwife and doctor need to be extra alert. Sometimes the second baby presents as a breech  and this demands extra care, but generally the labour progresses normally.

However, there is one major problem with twins (and other multiples of course) and that is the risk of pre-term birth (before 38 weeks) and prematurity – being born too young and therefore small. Although the triggers that start labour are not fully understood yet  one is possibly the weight of the uterine contents, and the combined weight of the twins may be the reason for the high incidence of birth before term. Doctors do all they can to delay labour, if it threatens to start too early, but often an early birth is unavoidable.

Starting Food: When

The big moment should come at about three to four months, when eight ounces in a bottle don’t satisfy her or she still seems hungry after nursing.

Developmental, she should also show readiness by virtue of being able to hold her head up, and by not reflexively thrusting her tongue out at the proffered food.

That’s all there is to it.

Starting solids too early runs the risk of inability to digest certain foods, which manifests itself as increased spitting up or frank vomiting, or lower intestinal signs of increased gassiness and diarrhea.

Don’t delay starting solids, either, because mastering the complex series of motor skills, which we take for granted as eating, is a major developmental process. In fact, the first several weeks of feeding are, nutritionally speaking, nearly irrelevant.

Projectile Vomiting

A term that gets thrown about quite often is “projectile” vomiting. Parents generally use it to mean forceful vomiting; pediatricians generally use it in reference to pyloric stenosis (or other far rarer blockages of the upper intestinal tract).

Pyloric stenosis is a condition where the muscle sphincter separating the stomach from the small intestine becomes too tight and actually blockades the stomach. The stomach’s normal peristaltic contractions get hurled into reverse, and the last feeding can end up, literally, across the room.

Forceful vomiting ends up only a quarter way across the room, or halfway across the room for overachievers or those living in small apartments. This generally occurs with reflux and is a completely separate problem.

Pyloric stenosis requires surgery, and since it runs in families, often Mom or Dad has a small, midline horizontal surgical scar, just under the middle of the ribcage. For some reason, only the firstborn is affected, and subsequent children are spared. So contemplate (just above) your navel. If you have one of these scars and your firstborn is vomiting all the way across the room, start dialing your doctor now.