Hi all,
My child is 6 months old and weve been struggling to get some answers for him. He’s overall a ridiculously happy baby and meeting all his milestones, but we’ve had feeding struggles since he was 2 months old. He was EBF, but I have a strong letdown and his feeds were very short and it wasn’t unusual for him to choke and cough. He started dropping percentiles, leading to a lot of stress. He refused a bottle for a long time, until we started working with a feeding therapist who diagnosed him with a tongue and lip tie. We got those revised and kept at it with feeding therapy, and he will take a bottle now but still really only eats when he’s tired/falling asleep. He does still choke pretty often, but that may be because he’s falling asleep while eating?
He’s also extremely drooly. We always get comments about how he’s teething, but he’s been this drooly since he was a month old and there’s no sign of teeth (I know each babe is different, but my first didn’t get his first teeth until he was over a year old, so we aren’t expecting teeth anytime soon). His breathing is also a bit of a challenge. He’s always had retractions (my first did too, so the pediatrician has never been concerned, saying it’s just their anatomy). His breathing also sounds very wet, like there’s mucus in his throat. Sometimes when he’s sleeping he has this weird breathing pattern that is like when they cry so hard and get hiccups. again, the pediatrician said it seemed like a hiccup type reaction and wasn’t concerned.
He has a cold right now, and now we’ve found that he squeaks a bit when he laughs, which made me think potentially laryngomalacia. We actually had a swallow study done yesterday. He didn’t cooperate super well, but the SLP didn’t see anything concerning. Would laryngomalacia show up in a swallow study?
I guess I’m just looking for some feedback from folks on whether this sounds like it could be laryngomalacia, or if I’m off base. I’m going to push to get him into an ENT regardless, but just not sure what to do at this point. The pediatrician is concerned with his slow weight gain, but also hasn’t offered much in the way of help getting answers or even a plan on how we can improve it beyond “give him more.”
Thanks in advance for any insight!!
TL/DR: 6 month old has had very slow weight gain, feeding struggles, is excessively drooly and has some breathing irregularities. No one has mentioned laryngomalacia, but I’m wondering if this could be a cause after he started squeaking when laughing.