Stop Pinching Your Sister! ***

In business school, we spent the better part of two years learning to apply rigorous statistical analysis to a variety of case studies. Most often, the answer boiled down to the bottom line. But in some cases, (particularly in my entrepreneurship class) the most successful companies / leaders were the ones that tossed the numbers aside and went with their gut.

As a parent, I often wonder how to balance the two, particularly when it comes to health care. When Puppy was born, for example, she was a model baby. By three months, she was sleeping eight-hour stretches at night. Without warning, her sleep patterns changed dramatically. By six months of age, she wasn’t sleeping longer than two hours at a stretch. By eight months of age, she was sleeping only twenty minutes at a stretch. Needless to say, I was in meltdown mode (The tears are welling up just thinking about all this again!).

To make matters worse, there weren’t any easy answers. I hauled Puppy to her pediatrician numerous times, begging for help. During what turned out to be my final visit with this particular pediatrician, she walked in the room, told me I needed to give myself permission to let Puppy cry it out, handed me a list of books on the subject, and walked out.

As an outspoken advocate of attachment parenting, I was furious with her lack of regard for my parenting philosophy. But more important, my gut told me she was wrong. Puppy was hurting. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. When she woke up, it was always with a startle, and she would jerk as though her stomach were hurting.

With no support from her pediatrician, I embarked on an elimination diet, certain that there must be something in my milk that was hurting Puppy. I got down to the point where I was eating only five foods: chicken, rice, spinach, oatmeal and pears. But to no avail.

Nevertheless, my intuition told me her pain was somehow related to my milk. In tears, I called a girlfriend for support. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re feeding her spinach?” I confirmed. She went on to inform me that spinach gave her husband the exact same symptoms Puppy was experiencing.

I couldn’t imagine that something as healthy as spinach could be hurting my baby, but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. I was nothing short of exhausted, and the more tired I became, the more routine it became for me to walk to the fridge, grab a handful of spinach, and try to get some more sleep. I’d eliminated everything else, why not give spinach a try?

I did, and the next day, Puppy slept for an hour straight. By the end of the week, she was sleeping two hour stretches. By the time she was nine months old, she was pain free and sleeping through the night.

This is not to say that I have anything against doctors; only a cautionary note that no doctor (or anyone else) can know your child as well as you do. If your doctor is giving you advice that doesn’t feel right, don’t accept it at face value. Instead, do a gut check and figure out if there is more to the story.