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Comment by atul_wired | Hacker News Reader

We learned the hard way that baby could be colic (with increased crying during evening hours) due to intolerance to cow’s milk/soy (via mother’s milk). It took us couple of months to get there (first stopped milk products and subsequently soy) and I wish we had known earlier. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post with the hope to help someone run through these possible causes as part of diagnosing the colic crying early on.

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When I was an infant in the 70s my mom, a RN, went with the fad and switched me to soy milk, away from dairy. I started becoming sick all the time and having issues. One day my dad, who took care of me most of the time, got sick of it and switched me back to cows milk. I got better and became normal. The soy went in the trash. Even now I can't tolerate soy protein. I'm not allergic, I just can't seem to digest it. I still love cows milk though.

Colic is really bad, it hurts the baby quite a bit, so they'll cry non-stop, which makes the adults crazy. If you have such a baby, it helps to remember how badly it's hurting them.

Have you ever had really bad heartburn? Now imagine that for hours on end, with no ability to do anything about it.

It hurts everyone really bad.

The child is screaming 12-16 hours a day, for in our case 9 months on end. It nearly resulted in divorce of a couple that had been through a lot with strength. It's hard on the child but it's also genuine torture to scream at someone 12-16 hours a day from the bottom of your lungs, in fact I'd call it domestic violence to torture others in this manner. Unless you've experienced this for 6+ months at a time, nothing but insane screaming every waking hour of the worst possible character (a child that sounds like they're dying it is so loud and painful), it's hard to convey the deep desire to just give up and leave the country or something. It's not he days that are hard but MONTHS of unending insane and constant screaming. Being tortured is not something that you can just get over just because the torturer is also feeling bad.

Yes we had doctors check it out. No there is no known exact cure for colic, we tried everything in the book (changing milks, diets, motion, burping, everything). Some forms of colic are simply incurable by any means. Our child was born RIGHT after covid broke out, so everyone (including medical workers) were scared shitless to be around us, there were no offers of relief from family or anyone. Pure hell.

On plus side, it magically went away when she was almost one.

Let me throw out another potential cause that worked for my parents: baby with a small butthole. They used lube and their fingers and gradually stretched it.

That baby may or may not have been me. The doctor our baby has had never heard of such a thing, so maybe it’s just hooey.

>The cause of colic is generally unknown. Fewer than 5% of infants who cry excessively turn out to have an underlying organic disease

Could be small asshole, but the thing about colic is usually there's simply NOTHING that can be fixed.

People want to think you can fix something, or that there is some underlying disease. With colic that is rarely the case. That's the maddening thing about it, there's nothing wrong per se with the child, nothing to fix, no cause to be found. People offer solutions constantly, you keep trying to solve it, but at the end of the day the child simply acts like they hate life and everyone in it and there's simply nothing you can do but wait it out for months. You can drive yourself mad trying to find something wrong when there simply is no curable solution but time.

Our baby had colic for the first three months. Nothing worked, as you said. Felt like it would last forever. Then one day she stopped. And at 3 months she started sleeping through the night.

Then vaccines, teething, a virus, etc. At 7 months this is the first time we have a baby that isn’t crying all day long.

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