Pink and Smooth

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. -Jane Austen

In early June of 2011, my daughter Sammi had the final endoscopy in a series of eight, each one marking a phase of her six-food-elimination diet for eosinophilic esophagitis. Each scope after the first one — the one that provided the diagnosis — was to test for the effect that a food had on the surface of her esophagus. A negative reaction would look like eczema in that muscular tube running from her throat to her stomach — patches of white, clustered cells, sometimes so thoroughly irritated that long, deep ridges would form, as though the disease itself had run a fingernail down the tissues there. That was the state of things when she had been diagnosed in June of 2010. Continue Reading…

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Bodies, Attended with Love

bodiesThis past weekend, I saw something exquisitely expressed, over and over, as though the universe was patiently explaining it to me in as many ways as it could. Here, it said to me, notice this. You don’t get it yet? Ok, notice this.

By the time I lay, exhausted and filled to the brim on Sunday evening, I had finally seen it. It was bodies, magnificent in every way, thrust at me all weekend, telling me the story of all the forms reverence can take. Continue Reading…

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One Food at a Time

Five years oldThe words “elimination diet” implied, when I first heard them, the opposite of the process through which we put our five-year-old daughter. I thought an elimination meant taking things out of the diet, one by one, until Sammi felt better and her esophagus ceased to have eosinophils coating its walls. In reality, the process worked in reverse. This was what her fifth year looked like: Continue Reading…

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