Author Archives: Debi

Feeding Therapy in a Vacuum

cerealHere’s the crazy thing about taking my 8 year old daughter to feeding therapy: no one important really knew we were there.

There was a complex set of circumstances that brought Sammi to the cheerful basement office suite forty minutes from our house. Unaware of this were a host pediatric medical specialists: an office of gastroenterologists, a cardiothoracic surgeon, an otolaryngologist, an endocrinologist, and her general pediatrician. Though all of them examined her, declared her capable of eating, and recognized that she did not, in fact, eat well, not one of them had recommended feeding therapy.

They didn’t recommend it when, despite the compression on her esophagus having been surgically relieved possibly for the first time in her life, she failed to eat any meal in under an hour — including a simple bowl of cereal at breakfast. Continue Reading…

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Doctors Made Mistakes: Now What?

Please watch this, all 21 minutes of it:

This Ted Talk was produced in 2011. While Dr. Goldman was speaking eloquently and so bravely about his humanity as a physician, my daughter Sammi was in kindergarten. That is, she was in kindergarten when she wasn’t on an operating table or in the gastroenterology clinic at our local children’s hospital, being treated for eosinophilic esophagitis, a condition with which, we would learn three years later, she had been misdiagnosed.

Dr. Goldman’s talk gives me hope. My bitterness about the lost and wasted years we spent engaged in the fight against the wrong enemy has not resulted in a lawsuit, not because I am not furious and not because I am not heartbroken and not because I don’t believe we could win. We haven’t sued because Sammi’s doctors are human beings. Continue Reading…

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Dear Weary, Frightened Mom

raspberriesheartDear Me, Two Years Ago,

I can see you, standing at the kitchen counter, packing up another lunch you’re sure you’ll see again, nearly intact, in seven hours. I see you cutting that tortilla in half a little too angrily, putting cookies in a bag in a ritually delicate way, hoping that if you don’t break them, she’ll eat a whole cookie instead of the half that breaks. I see you counting raspberries, asking yourself how many she can eat during her snack time so that, by lunch, she’ll only have more calorie-dense food left to fill her up.

I see you struggling not to ask her if she ate her lunch when you greet her after school. I see you handing her a banana right there on the playground, too distracted by waiting for her to peel it to really hear how her day was. I hear your teeth clenching. I can feel your toes curling in your shoes as you chant, in your head, take a bite take a bite oh my lord take a fucking bite, NOW. Continue Reading…

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Unlearning the Body

chocoAfter six weeks on a fat-free diet and a week on a low-fat diet, my eight-year-old daughter Sammi was officially released from all her food restrictions by her cardiothoracic surgery team. Her chylothorax — a leak in the thoracic ducts that process fat — had completely healed.

The two of us had decided to spend the day together in downtown Chicago, starting with a visit to the Hershey Store. After all, it had been nearly two months since she’d had free rein to eat anything she wanted. I thought that surely she would gorge herself on candy while I watched gleefully.

Instead, she nibbled timidly and said, “I’m full for now.”

It was heartbreaking to realize that, as far as she’d come — years of false diagnosis with reflux, then eosinophilic esophagitis, then a revelation that her swallowing problems stemmed from a structural obstruction in her chest, culminating in major cardiac surgery — she still had more hurdles to jump. Of course we couldn’t undo eight years of her experience of eating in one day at the candy store. Why had I been so naive? Continue Reading…

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6 Things Not to Say to a Family on a Medically Restrictive Diet

talkingBetween my daughter Sammi’s birth and her ninth birthday, she spent nearly all of her life on some kind of medically-restrictive diet. Whether it was being forbidden to eat grains as a baby, following an acid-free diet as a refluxing toddler, using the six-food-elimination diet to uncover the cause of her (incorrectly-diagnosed) eosinophilic esophagitis as a little girl, or choking down the unpleasant fat-free food that kept her safe from chylothorax after her cardiac surgery, we often had to define what our whole family ate by the things that Sammi had to avoid.

During all those years, I heard a number of unhelpful comments about what I fed my child, ranging from the well-meaning but insensitive to the downright offensive. If someone in your world is eating a diet that their doctor has prescribed, the following comments should never, ever come out of your mouth. Continue Reading…

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