This will only be interesting to people with toddlers or that know other people with toddlers.  Sorry to everyone else.  But I wish I had known all this 1 year ago. 

My 5yo daughter has had a stomach ache of varying intensities for a year now.  We have been to the doctors, to the emergency room twice.  They have taken x-rays and probed her and investigated.  They invariably described her condition as “constipation”.  It was never quite to the point of a blockage. Just that she was “backed up”.  They gave us Miralax to take every day.  They told us this is very common. They kind of made it seem as if we were bad parents that we hadn’t been giving her a laxative all along. As if it made lots of common sense that we should guess that a child that never was “actually” constipated needed prophylactic laxatives.

The laxative made the problem better sometimes but never made it go away and forced my daughter (and us) to spend a an enormous amount of time in the bathroom.  I’m going to blog someday about how my friends that were sooooo persuasive that child rearing was the most fulfilling activity never mentioned exactly how much time you spend in the bathroom.

Two days ago, in a moment of pure serendipity, I decided to see if maybe she was having a bad reaction to dairy.  This caused some ranting and raving.  It meant no more pizza, milk, cheese on pasta, mac & cheese, well… anything with cheese.  My daughter was UNHAPPY. But, in a fit of daddy firmness I prevailed.

Two days later, she is 99.99% better.  Seriously.  One year of heart-rending middle of the night sobbing about her stomach.  One year of emergency room visits and everything that goes with it. All we had to do was cut out the dairy.

Please pass this along to other parents and their pediatricians. I wish someone had suggested this to me.