When we brought our daughter Sammi home from her week-long stay in the hospital following cardiac surgery, we had an extra challenge to face. When we planned the surgery, we’d known that once we got her home (if we got her home), she’d need to rest. We’d expected that she’d be tired, that she’d be loopy from the medication. What we hadn’t expected was that she’d be one of the percentage of patients who undergo similar surgeries and end up with a complication called chylothorax.
Chylothorax is a long, ugly word for a leak in a thoracic duct. The thoracic ducts are part of the body’s lymphatic system, located mostly in the chest, and are responsible for — among other things — the processing of about 60% of the body’s dietary fat, which flows through them. Because the thoracic duct is located alongside the aorta, Sammi’s surgeon warned us that they might nick it with an instrument during surgery. “If that happens,” he said, “it usually heals on its own, but she might have to follow a special diet for a while.”
I barely listened. Special diet? I’d done special diets over and over again since Sammi was a baby. A diet would be no big deal. Also: it might not even happen! I did no research on chylothorax before Sammi’s surgery.
And then she had it. In clearing layers of scar tissue from the side of her esophagus, the surgeon had met with a thoracic duct, and the damage was done.
The diet, we learned, was fat-free. It didn’t mean fat-free the way that the weight-loss diets of the 80s meant “fat-free” — many of those foods, we learned, had a gram or two of fat. In a normal person with a functioning thoracic system, that’s close enough to fat-free. In someone with chylothorax, a gram of fat here and there would eventually leak out of her thoracic ducts and fill her chest with a thick, milky substance that had nowhere to go. Eventually, without more surgery, she’d drown from the inside.
Drown in fat. Continue Reading…
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