A Peanut Won't Eat

I know you've been losing sleep, wondering how Peanut is doing, so here we go (yet again). You knew that he couldn't chew food, right? I told you that, yes? I'm sure I did. So anyway, since the boy is over two and is still eating baby food out of jars, several doctors decided he needed intervention (not that kind; the alcoholic intervention will come later). So after months and months of hating on the insurance company, he got approved to go to Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital. This is a fairly well-known hospital in Baltimore that was started in 1922 with the sole purpose of treating children with severe medical disorders. They have a feeding clinic as part of it for kids just like Peanut. Most of the kids in the feeding clinic are kids who have been on a feeding tube their whole lives and are just now figuring out solid foods for the first time. A few are like Peanut, who have food phobias due to various factors, usually severe food allergies like he has. Six doctors observed Peanut in various rooms/environments and/or a live-feed video. They finally concluded that he likely has all the tools he needs, he just doesn't choose to use them. Great. Maybe now when I tell people that he is so fricking stubborn he would rather starve himself to death than eat something he doesn't want to, they'll believe me. He literally will starve himself. And when I say literally, I mean it the right way, not the way stupid people use it.

So the good news is that they think over the course of several months they'll be able to coax him into chewing something. He'll have to go once a week every week for possibly up to a year or more, but they're fairly confident it'll happen. The bad news is that the doctor in charge of this whole feeding clinic team of folks says that Peanut has the most severe food allergies he's ever seen in his career. Mind you, this is a doctor who works in a hospital designed to treat seriously medically-hosed up kids. SO COMFORTING. So given that he's on that end of the spectrum, who knows how long it'll take to get him to eat. He still gets most of his calories from the hypoallergenic formula they put him on after his hospital stay when he was six months old. They've tried to switch him to other things designed for kids his age (because they need more calories than the formula has to offer) and he refuses to switch. Refuses to the point of simply stopping eating until we switch him back. He's skin and bones already so they said no more trying to force a change for now.

I mean, can you believe the sheer STUBBORNNESS of this child?? What the frick is with my kids anyway?

So, you know, if you'd like to pray for little Peanut or just send good thoughts his way, they'd all be greatly appreciated. Fricking kid....