GERD and Shaken Baby Syndrome

Before I became a parent, the only time I ever heard about Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) was on the news.  Usually, the incident occurred in an inner-city area.  Drugs and alcohol were almost always involved, as was general family dysfunction.  I remember seeing images of distraught mothers or dazed fathers/boyfriends weeping and professing sorrow over the incident, and I remember thinking: how could you do that to your own child?  How could you put your child at risk by staying with a violent and abusive partner?!

This perception of SBS, though not directly supported, was nevertheless reinforced in the parenting class my husband and I took at the hospital where our first daughter was born.  SBS was addressed primarily from the standpoint of knowing the symptoms and being aware of whether a family member or babysitter were prone to violence and likely to harm our baby.

Recent studies, however, change all that.  Although it is still more likely for a baby to be shaken by an adult male rather than an adult female, the stereotype of an angry boyfriend shaking his girlfriend's baby while high on drugs is steadily being replaced by the more likely scenario of a loving but exhausted father shaking his reflux baby during a nervous breakdown without even realizing what he's doing.  Current research suggests that over 90% of all SBS cases are the result of a parent losing control due to the incessant crying of a baby with reflux or colic.  Truth be told, colic and pediatric GERD significantly increase a baby's risk of Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Before I became a parent, I never would have described anger as a routine weakness in me.  Impatience and at times arrogance?  Yes.  Anger?  No.  Sure, things upset me at times, but never anything I couldn't talk out or work out or pray out of my system.

But when reflux raised its ugly head in my household and my girls cried incessantly--sometimes at the same time, sometimes one right after the other, sometimes for hours, days, or weeks on end with only a few intermittent periods of quiet--I was shocked and embarrassed and humiliated to discover a Hulk-like maternal rage born in me.

I wasn't really angry with them.  I knew deep down inside that they were crying out of pain and couldn't help what they were doing.  I was angry with the reflux, angry with the people who told me to just let them cry, angry with my own inability to console them, angry with my utter lack of sleep, angry with my own post-partum depression and fried nerves, and yes, I was angry with God.

There were times when every strategy to calm and soothe them failed, and I felt the rage boiling and rising inside like volcanic lava ready to erupt--times when I realized my grasp on them was becoming tighter and tighter--times when I had to put them safely in their cribs and walk away.  I hated walking away--hated the thought of leaving them alone in their room with their pain to cry while I withdrew my presence, if not my comfort, from them.   There were times when I sat in the hall outside their room and cried--times when I paced the house yelling at God--and times when I fell down on the floor pleading with God not to abandon my children or me, but to calm them when I couldn't, and to protect them from my anger, and to utterly kill and destroy every bit of anger and rage inside of me.

It has not been an easy road.  The transformation of my inner self has been a long and difficult time coming.  But we are past the stage of routine excessive crying now, and I have learned--primarily through prayer--to manage myself and subdue my own anger before even trying to deal with the girls.  We still struggle periodically at night with reflux triggered by illness or teething, and that can bring on hours of crying and fussing.  We still struggle by day with periodic and sometimes completely random meltdowns, which I understand are still par for the course.  But where I used to watch the news and judge the parents or guardians of babies who had been shaken, I now listen to those same stories and weep with complete humility and compassion, knowing to the core of my soul, "There but for the grace of God, go I."


For more information about GERD, SBS, and tips to cope, please visit the following sites:
http://www.pollywogbaby.com/refluxandcolic/shakenbabysyndrome.html

http://www.parenting-journals.com/81/colic-and-shaken-baby-syndrome/

http://www.colichelp.com/shakenbabysyndrome.html

http://www.dontshake.org/sbs.php?topNavID=3&subNavID=25&navID=283