Category Archives: ee

When It Looks Like a Blueberry, It’s Probably a Blueberry

blueberry

My daughter Sammi was born at 41.5 weeks of gestation at four pounds and eleven ounces. I have spent the last ten years reciting those statistics in reverse.

“So mom, what was her birth weight?” is often one of the first questions a pediatric specialist asks.

A pause for my answer, and then I could chant it along with them: “So was she premature?”

No, she wasn’t, I have to answer. She was what they call post-term, which is the opposite of premature. It’s late. She was waiting it out inside me, and then when she came out as tiny as a premature baby, everyone scrambled. She was totally proportionate — filled out and lovely, just miniature. The hospital did genetic testing and found nothing out of the ordinary. That’s when we began to hear two different lines of justification for her size. Continue Reading…

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Erased

samminecklaceBetween July 1, 2010 and April 10, 2011, I prepared over 800 meals that excluded some combination of dairy, egg, soy, nuts, and wheat.

Over 800 times, I checked and double-checked against the current list in my head. What is she allowed to have today?, I asked myself as the restrictions lifted, one by one. I paused as I used my mixing bowls, contaminating them with the newest addition, knowing I might have to throw it away if this food trial was a failure. I paused as I asked Sammi if she liked the newest recipe, worrying about the possibility of taking it away again later. I paused and paused again, rethinking each ingredient and each interaction around food.

When Sammi passed every food trial, her doctors could not explain it. They shrugged, confused, and sent us on our way. After more than 800 meals governed by rules and restrictions and embarked upon with my shoulders squared and my resolve set, the journey was over. We were at square one: all choices available to us, all foods a possibility, the road ahead open.

It was an unbelievable mindfuck. Continue Reading…

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Waking Up to the Pill Cutter

pillcutterIt was the summer of 2011 when, with no swallowed steroids and a totally unrestricted diet, my daughter Sammi was declared to be “in remission” from eosinophilic esophagitis, the disease with which she had been diagnosed almost exactly a year prior. Though we had turned our lives upside down to follow the prescribed elimination diet — including replacing our cutting boards, pots and pans to avoid potential cross-contamination — we were suddenly thrust, untethered again, into “normal life.”

Except one thing. Continue Reading…

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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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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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