A tough week

It has been another long week. It began last Friday, just as we put Micah into bed. Upchuck. Earlier in the afternoon, I suspected that he may have eaten a piece of a fungus from our yard. With all the rain we have been having, they were prolific! Anyway, I tried not to be too concerned until he started vomiting. So, we called poison control (yes, again!). The very nice person on the line said, "Well, we put fungus into three classifications. First, the totally benign. Second the gastro-intestinal irritant. And third, something more serious. We won't know whether it is the second or third until he doesn't stop having symptoms after 6 hours or so." So we waited. He stopped vomiting after a few hours, thank goodness. He never had any other symptoms: no fever or pain that he let us know about. But we ran out of clean sheets for his bed for the first time in his life--shows how fortunate we have been with him so far!

After a sluggish day on Saturday, he seemed to be fine, but he wouldn't eat much of anything. His canon of food that he's willing to eat just keeps shrinking. He is physically very capable of eating by himself, but lately we have had to feed him nearly everything. If we wait for him to eat, he just won't. And since his food is part of his medicine, he needs to eat! We have resorted to sort of holding him down to get a few bites in his mouth. It feels terrible for us and for him to do that, but we don't feel like we have much of a choice. We have been in contact with his doctor and keto team, and he had some blood work done on Friday. Again, we wonder if he is ketoacidotic--too much ketosis--which can lead to feeling generally crummy. That would explain a lot. We hope to find out tomorrow.

And then on Tuesday, I woke up feeling pretty awful myself. So we think it was probably a virus after all that Micah had. Made me feel better as a parent that I hadn't allowed him to poison himself, but worse for myself for catching whatever it was.

With every meal, every bite, really, being a struggle of wills, mealtime is exhausting. And it's worse while being sick yourself, that's for sure. By Wednesday and the latter part of the week, I felt like giving up on this diet. I think we sort of thought that the hardest part of this diet would be at the beginning. But four months in, it's harder than ever. No, we're not actually giving up, we're just frustrated and discouraged.We were wondering, though, what to do if he absolutely refused to eat anything--we were almost at that point.

And then on Saturday, a bit of a breakthrough. In racking my brain for any idea of a new recipe, I came up with a winner--cheese and macadamia nut flour crackers. Actually, they are really good. When Micah ate one, and then another I just started crying with relief. These were the first bites of food he put in his own mouth for a week or more (the poor eating had begun even before he got sick). And he has eaten these crackers several for every meal since then. We hope that this may lead, after a time, to him being willing to eat other things again, too. Until then, if he eats macadamia crackers for every meal, well, at least he's eating something. Thank you, God, for macadamia nut deliciousness.