Back for a Follow-Up

It's time to get rid of Entocort. The only good thing that it did was make my son learn how to swallow a horse-size pill. He throws those two pills back with breakfast every morning all by himself like a champion. Beyond that, I would say that the medication has truly done nothing.

Not all is bad though: for the first time in 10 months, we did have a good solid stretch of solid several weeks ago. However, I'm (tentatively) convinced it was more due to the introduction of EleCare 1-2 times daily than it was the Entocort. Soon after we ran out of the EleCare, the stools started looking like the same old runny bloody mess. In fact, we're headed to the GI doc today to see what we can do about getting either EleCare or Absorb Plus covered by insurance and going with the enteral nutrition route for a while. I'll update soon with what I find out.

As for the SCD, it's almost a masochistic way of life now with what we feed our son and it's difficult to imagine abandoning it. The rest of our family has become less rigid about adhering to the SCD and we've stopping hiding the fact that mommy and daddy will sometimes have a bagel or bowl of cereal. Our son is mostly okay with that but certain foods really do hit his hot button if he sees them (potato chips and bagels). He's had a weird fetish lately of wanting to smell our coffee too. He tells us that he won't taste it, but he just wants to smell it. His sense of smell has sharpened dramatically over the last 6 months...

I cannot begin to express how much of a roller coast ride SCD shopping is... going to certain stores for certain things every week: Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, QFC, Safeway, The Grocery Outlet (the one we go to is now self-dubbed the "ghetto" store), and the local fruit market. Shopping at Whole Foods makes me crazy. In many ways it's a great store because I've been able to find the hard-to-find stuff there: SCD-legal sausage, hot dogs, dry curd cottage cheese, and legal sliced turkey deli-meat. But seemingly at random, Whole Foods discontinues carrying certain products that were our son's *favorite* (like the legal deli turkey):

"Sorry son, you can't have turkey anymore because the grocery store no longer wants to sell daddy a half a pound for $7"!