"Our concerns weren't heard"

We took our 4 week old son to the hospital last month as he was in a clear constant state of agony and was high pitched squealing for 21 hours that day. From he was 3 days old he was in a constant state of pain and could not sleep due to this with nothing settling him. 

Earlier that day we brought him to the GP who said he had reflux and prescribed carobel. When we gave him carobel it made him worse and he ended up projectile vomiting and then going floppy on us- which led to our visit to hospital. 

When we got to the hospital we were triaged and then sat in a cubicle with our son. As we got to the hospital our son fell asleep for a while but then became unsettled again and was in between these states. We spoke to a doctor who advised it could just be reflux and would go and see if they could get gaviscon for him. Over an hour later we were still sitting there as the doctor we spoke to sat at the nurses station on their phone. Another doctor then came in and started to assess him again, we explained to them as the carobel seemed to make him worse it may not be reflux, to which they agreed and said as he wasn’t constantly spitting up etc they didn’t think it was reflux. 

As he was unsettled they asked us to take a urine sample for him, this was uncomfortable for him and made him more unsettled. During this a nurse came in and squeezed sucrose syrup into his mouth without even asking us if we wanted him to have it, they also had a patronising attitude as if we didn’t know what we were doing and he was just a baby crying normally. 

The doctors also had the same attitude just kept saying he's asleep and settled now, or babies do cry. Not hearing our actual concern, when the urine test came back clear the doctor came back to talk to us after we had sat there for 4 hours and there was only 1 other baby there at the time. They said they thought he had purple crying, and for us to ensure not to shake him when he is crying. This was a very condescending experience for us and made us feel like we were being patronised as we were first time mums just there because our baby was normally crying. 

The doctor advised again that they didn’t think he had reflux. Our baby continued to be in pain constantly for weeks after this and after the doctor saying it wasn’t reflux we didn’t know what we were going to do especially as we knew it wasn’t purple crying. 

After our own research we eventually found that he had silent reflux and after finding the right reflux food he is now a lot more settled. 

This was a very hard visit for us especially with the anxieties that already come with having a new-born. I think reflection on how doctors speak to new mums would go along way, especially taking maternal instincts seriously. I feel that our baby’s pain was romanticised as he was so cute. I hope we don’t have this issue again in future and maybe some lessons learned could be taken from this.