So I’d hoped to keep up day to day, with Mike’s feeding therapy, but we soon got started and in no time I was carried away in to a new world of behavioural psychology. As a family, it’s a new way of parenting our little boy, Mike.
Mike is cute, funny, cheeky, all the things you’d expect from a two year old; but has a very unique problem. He doesn’t know how to eat. For Mike it comes in two waves, he doesn’t feel hunger like most of us would and is extremely sensitive (or has sensory sensitivities). Most foodstuffs are too overwhelming, to the point he wretches, gags, vomits and closes his eyes. Things got so bad for Mike recently, that he was rapidly losing weight and was poorly. He needed to be nasogastric tube fed.
There isn’t a problem with swallow or digestion, Mike doesn’t have reflux, his problem lies in his brain, he has an infant feeding disorder. For 19 months we battled on, with a little boy rapidly losing weight and visibly not coping. No doctor or dietician knew what to do, and it was looking very likely, Mike would become a tube dependent child. Sad reality, when eating is a learned behaviour that Mike is very capable of learning, well he doesn’t have a choice in that matter any longer thankfully! The NHS locally just didn’t have the resources to help, with such a specialist matter so we had to look elsewhere, to Clarissa Martin to be exact
In April 2014 we were awarded funding from the CCG to see Clarissa, one of the only professionals in the country, specialist in this field. We’d met in advance of April 2014, and I knew she could help Mike but three days in to our journey, it’s clear this lady is going to prove life changing for my little boy and me.
