The Cure for Colic

I am scientist. Although I love the idea of romance and soul mates and have been known to flirt with religion, deep down in my core most of my beliefs are backed up by double blind placebo control trials with an n >1000. That is, until Mia came into my life.

Similar to how I felt about the whole “day 5 hormonal surge” I initially didn’t think that “baby brain” would apply to me. In fact it was probably the same group of people that told me about the cry day who warned me that upon delivering the placenta you lose part of your brain. I didn’t believe it. It never happened with Toby (not that I can remember, anyway), so I should have been safe this time, too, right?

Wrong.

I noticed my severely handicapped concentration skills on my first night home with Mia. It was 2 am; she was having a marathon feed and I was watching a movie on TV. I was literally 90 minutes into the movie when one of the characters started to have what looked like an epileptic fit. I found myself thinking, “I wonder what’s going on.” Then I started to question why I didn’t know what was going on and I realized that I had been watching the movie with the sound off the entire time. It wasn’t as if there was a ton of stuff going on; I was sitting in an empty room all alone at 2 am for a full 90 minutes in complete silence before I noticed that my difficulty following the movie was due to the fact that I’d inadvertently pressed the mute button an hour and a half ago. No wonder I wasn’t following properly.

Since then, my IQ has seemingly oozed out of me with my breast milk. When Mia became increasingly colicky at around 3 weeks I decided it was time to do some research into it. I had access to dozens of textbooks and online resources as well as some intelligent colleagues. What did I choose? Yahoo Questions and some “Hot Mommy Chat Boards”.

It was then that I threw all scientific evidence on Ovol drops and Gripe water out of the window and laid down my credit card for substances that have absolutely no research to back them up other than some positive reviews on various new-mom forums. I figured it couldn’t do her any harm…

When neither of the above solutions worked I chalked the colic up to the full moon and focused my internet searching to confirming my suspicion that a full moon DOES mess you up. Unfortunately, not even Google complied with my thoughts on this, but somewhere in the depths of my memory I found, in the sober moments of my Grade 13 grad trip to Cancun, something about the Mayan culture accounting for many behaviours on the cycles of the moon. That was evidence enough for me and the fact that Google hadn’t anything to back this up just confirmed that I was unveiling a new theory into colic.

This theory provided me with enough optimism to get through the next week as I watched the moon nightly and waited patiently for the full moon to pass and my new baby to return to her lovely, sleepy, one week self.

When the full moon passed and the colic continued, I sucked up my pride and took her to my doctor. Turns out there were SOME evidence for probiotics and the fact that EVERY SINGLE PHARMACY IN COLLINGWOOD was sold out of them clinched it for me. I dropped an easy $50 and waited the suggested 4-5 days for them to start working with renewed optimism.

When day 7 came and went with equal parts fussiness and crying, I want back to old faithful; yahoo questions. I believe I typed something like “colic + cure + diet”. Because CLEARLY I was doing something wrong with my diet. It didn’t take long to notice the trend in responses; the culprit was so OBVIOUSLY dairy I spit out my latte and vowed off dairy in my last ditch effort to regain my sanity and “cure” my now 6 week old problem child.

The very next day as evening approached I held my breath. Mia snacked at 5, smiled up at me and opened her mouth to unveil a big yawn. And she fell asleep.

Silence.

The colic was gone.

And so here I am, several weeks later having solved the greatest scientific dilemmas of my career. The solution was simple – forget evidence based trials; all I needed was to go dairy free, stop caffeine, start Mia on probiotics and use the occasional dose of ovol drops.

OR maybe she just needed to turn 6 weeks old. Either way, I learned some valuable lessons in patience, astronomy and life beyond science. Maybe this new “mommy brain” is just what I needed…