Benigno Erasmo David

In the first days of life, Ben-Ben had issues passing bowel movements, requiring suppositories to help him along.  His movements became more regular until my breast milk began being fortified with extra calories and iron, since the volume of breast milk he can presumably handle, based on his weight, does not provide the adequate number of calories and nutrients he needs.  While obviously beneficial, the fortification has a couple of unfortunate side effects on Ben’s poop:

1) Blowouts. Newborns and even preemies will normally poop every few hours in moderate amounts. Ben has been managing to poop once every 24-36 hours, and when he does, his movements are “explosive”, per several nurses.

2) Battery-smell.  Newborn poop usually smells like, well, poop, and usually less foul than adult, formed poop.  The fortification has made Ben’s poop smell particularly foul and metallic, perhaps like rotting metal if that even exists.  This is not particular to Ben though; a nurse told us the other day that since most babies in the NICU are on this fortification, they occasionally need to air the NICU out if a few of babies happen to poop at the same time.

I’ve managed to change Ben after a couple of these blowouts.  For the first one I cleaned up, I was in the middle of measuring his length with the nutritionist, who heard the movement and smelled the smell and remarked, as if embarrassed for Ben, “Oh my!” Subsequently, our nurse came by to see what had happened and said, “Oh boy.  We’re going to have to change his incubator if we can’t manage to air that out. No one should have to live in that.”  In another blowout that both Lawrence and I happened to miss, the nurse told us she had to bathe Ben since “it got all over him”.

Ben manages to save the special blowouts, however, for Tatay Lawrence.  For probably already half a dozen times, Lawrence manages to induce the blowouts after, or if unlucky during, the diaper change.  In one particularly memorable diaper change, Ben managed to have 4 consecutive blowouts, all during the change.  By the fourth one, his poop was all over the inside of his incubator.  And Lawrence was so flustered in trying to do damage control that he managed to drop the wipes he was using to clean up from the roof of the incubator, down its side, and onto the floor, leaving enormous streaks all along the way.  Lolo Rico was there and actually got on his hands and knees to clean the floor while our poor nurse had to find an entirely new incubator.  Lawrence said that the whole time, Ben looked nonplussed, and perhaps even calculating, as he does during one of my changes in the picture below.  I joke that Ben knows who wants to collect his poop and is simply being thoughtful with his timing.

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