Category Archives: eosinophilic esophagitis

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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Sammi’s Restaurant

When Sammi was a feisty three year old and we were still unclear about why she ate so slowly and with such unusual habits, I tried to entice her to eat heartier foods by inviting her to cook alongside me. It was a method recommended anywhere I sought help with “picky eating,” even though she wasn’t picky in the way that most people described their picky-eating children. She tried a great many things — always willing, often surprisingly eager — but seldom more than a few bites. Cooking together — particularly baking together — was my attempt at imbuing food with a kind of positive energy. It was Jewish-mama-mojo, those afternoons when I plopped her on a stool next to me and held her little hand as it dropped flour in a bowl, stirred eggs, drizzled oil. Continue Reading…

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Mother Blessing

tostados

More than ten years ago, I attended a mother-blessing, also known sometimes as a blessingway, for one of my closest friends. Andrea was due shortly thereafter with her second child, a daughter. Surrounded by a small group of powerful, loving women, Andrea and her still-gestating daughter were touched by healing hands and given tokens of energy and affection in the form of beads to make a bracelet Andrea could use as a focus in labor.

Mid-way through the evening, we gathered in the kitchen of the host, Andrea’s friend, for food and drink. She bustled around in front of the stove and returned with a steaming ceramic bowl of refried black beans, smelling strongly of garlic, and a platter of corn tostados. We all slathered the crunchy, oversized tortilla chips with the savory beans, and I knew that, perhaps in small part due to the circumstances heavy with love and support, I’d fallen in love with a food. Continue Reading…

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