Getting closer to the answer?

In the past week we have been thinking and learning a lot about fats and fat digestion and it feels like we may be inching closer to figuring out what is going wrong with Ellie's digestion. Several times in the past week I've actually uttered the phrase "what if this is the last piece of the puzzle!?!"

Over the course of months it's become apparent that Ellie cannot tolerate saturated fats. The foods she has reacted worst to are very high in saturated fat: ghee, coconut oil, beef, tallow, cacao butter and eggs. A couple of weeks ago I trialed cacao butter in my diet and it was immediately apparent it was a problem. Ellie suddenly wouldn't go down for bed, telling us her tummy hurt and having the jerky cramping abdomen during sad awakenings overnight. I had thought duck eggs were fine, but Ellie hadn't been doing well for about a month and so three days ago I pulled the duck eggs and suddenly she was a different person. The last two nights she's slept nearly 12 hours in a row! Hallelujah.

Navigating murky waters

I have been hesitant to write lately because a lot of things have happened that I haven't really know what to think and/or say about them. We've received new information about Ellie's health, we've had family in town, we traveled out of town, Ellie and I both came down with a stomach virus, we marked 6 months on SCD/GAPS, we've had several food trials fail, Ellie has been riding a constipation/diarrhea roller coaster that's made everyone miserable, we started a new supplement, we've seen a new doctor and been referred to yet another doctor. Bleh. It's been an exhausting month.

It feels like the energy shifted about a month ago when we got back the results for Ellie's IGG allergy test. It came back showing us nothing. Nothing we didn't know already, anyway. The ONLY food she had a reaction to was chicken eggs, which we had already confirmed as an allergy through a skin prick test at her mainstream allergist's office and subsequent elimination and challenge. The test showed nothing else, and we were shocked. Nothing for dairy, nothing for gluten, nothing for coconut, nothing for citrus - shocked.

2

It happened. My baby girl turned 2. I can't believe it. The past couple of weeks have been crazy - crazy busy and also just crazy emotionally as I try to process the fact that Ellie is 2. There may or may not have been a moment where I sobbed to Ian "I can't believe she's 2 and she's not better yet!"

These types of milestones have been hard for me from the beginning. When Ellie was a baby I created imaginary timelines to reassure myself that things would normalize soon. For example, there was a phase where I had to put Ellie in the Ergo and walk up and down the house, BLASTING an Irish lullaby CD while bouncing up and down with! a boob in her mouth - sometimes for a half an hour or more - just to get her to sleep. And she never slept more than 30 minutes. During that time I told myself she'd be an easier baby after her first birthday. Lots of people had told me tough babies mellow out by their first birthday. Well those people hadn't met Ellie. By her first birthday we had barely begun our elimination diet journey and hadn't even figured out she was allergic to eggs.