Two-year-old gets sick from drinking too much milk

When we are babies and young toddlers, we are required to drink milk. Every kid grows up drinking milk, but a lot of parents don’t know that too much milk can be pretty harmful to their kids. Anastacia Gencarelli didn’t know that drinking too much milk can harm her child. So, when her little girl Mia, who was about two-years-old, started getting sick, she was shocked. Because she doesn’t want other parents experiencing what she had to go through, she now is telling and cautioning other parents.

Anastacia one day noticed that Mia was continually pulling on her ears, suspecting it was some kind of an ear infection. She then took Mia to the doctor, where they examined her and gave Anastacia medicine for the following week for Mia to take. A week went by, and Mia was back to normal after taking her weeks’ worth of medication. After she stopped taking medicine, Mia started to get sick again, and Anastacia took her back to the doctor again. The doctor gave them the same medication and said to repeat the same thing from the week before. But this time, Mia wasn’t getting better, and because she was sick, she was always tired and sluggish. She even started showing behaviour that she might have pica. Pica is an eating disorder where people begin to eat things that are not considered food. Mia was starting to chew and eat baby wipes and chalk.

When Anastacia and her husband started seeing that Mia wasn’t getting better at all and was getting pale, they started worrying. So, they brought her to the hospital, where doctors began running some tests on her. It was very unusual when the doctors tried to take blood but couldn’t. Anastacia has said that it took seven tries to draw blood from Mia. After doctors saw that they couldn’t take blood from Mia’s arm. After the fourth try, they decided that they needed to place the IV into Mia’s femoral artery. They kept checking her vitals all the time.

A few hours later, when the blood tests were done, doctors figured out what was causing Mia to be so sick. They told Mia’s parents that the cause was drinking too much milk. This sickness is called milk anemia, and drinking too much milk with very little iron in it can cause the illness. Mia needed to get a blood transfusion because she lost so much blood because of her iron deficiency, and also other scans and tests required to be done. Anastacia has said that it was tough seeing her little girl getting poked several times just to get the IV in place. Having to go through all those scans, ultrasounds and other tests were not easy for a two-year-old kid. She has said that Mia is not fully recovered and will have to take in iron in the following weeks. The doctors have limited drinking no more than two bottles of milk a day.

The blood transfusions helped immensely, and getting iron back in her body has helped with the anaemia and getting her haemoglobin back to normal. Going through all of this, another problem has arisen because of the placement of the IV, a blood clot has formed in her leg where the IV had to be placed. For the blood clot, she had to be put on anti-coagulants, so it doesn’t get worse. After Mia is back to normal and healthy, doctors have said that she can drink from 3 to four bottles of milk a day.

Because Anastacia and her husband don’t want other parents to go through all that they have gone through. They are spreading the news on their social media, so other parents know about milk-anaemia. Anastacia has said that she would have never thought that such a thing as drinking too much milk can cause her child to get so sick, so now she is warning other parents.