Category Archives: esophagus

What to Bring

bagIf you are ever the person I was, packing a car to drive to the hospital for your daughter’s seventeenth time under general anesthesia (this time, to move her aorta away from her esophagus), you will need to bring many things with you. Take notes. I know exactly what you will need, if you are ever the person I was.

First of all, you need clothes for you. You need soft pants and a roomy shirt to sleep in on an uncomfortable set of cushions by the window, cushions whose ill-suitedness for restful sleep you will not notice as you sink, delirious with exhaustion, in and out of a black slumber twenty times a night. You need thick socks and slip-on shoes so that you can perch on the edge of the bed and then jump off quickly to skitter across the room and grab the emesis basin, the phone, the nurse’s call button. You need more hooded sweatshirts than you would have predicted. You will be far colder than one would expect.

You do not need clothes for your daughter. Though you may have thought ahead to the incisions and the need for button-down as opposed to pull-over pajamas, you have somehow forgotten the snaking tubes and lines and leads and wires that would need to be disconnected in order to manage something as complicated as sleeves. She will only need hospital gowns. The pajama bottoms, while a nice touch, are only an impediment to quick bathroom trips, of which there will be many.

Perhaps, just bring her some socks. Continue Reading…

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The Second Time Is Different

Sending a baby into cardiac surgery is hard.

I brought Sammi to the hospital that morning in 2006, and she was wearing fleece pajamas covered in frogs. She was 13 months old and had a light layer of soft duck-fluff hair that stuck to my face when I cried, but she had perhaps a word or two in her vocabulary, neither appropriate for anything approaching real communication. She was beautiful and soft, and she smelled wonderful, and I could trace the shape her body made on my torso as she laid there, but had I lost her that day, far more of what I would lose of her was in the future and amorphous. Our experiences together until then were primal still — nursing and holding, touch and smell, fear and love.

It was all uncertain then: who would she be? what was she like when she was not sick? how would her voice sound when she learned to sing? 

She was a mystery, yet, and grieving a mystery is still grieving, but it’s fuzzy and intangible. I would never know quite what to miss. Continue Reading…

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Terrible Conversation, Part II

conversationGiving a child bad news hurts on every level. Integrity tells us to be honest, realistic, straightforward. Nurturing tells us to soften the blow. Getting the combination right means compromising both.

When we had to tell our daughter Sammi just before her fourth birthday that she had been diagnosed with an inflammatory disorder called eosinophilic esophagitis, we did it in an age-appropriate way that, thankfully, also forced us to simplify the problem for ourselves. The new diagnosis meant a host of food restrictions that would change over time, but we focused on the first six weeks that would exclude dairy, eggs, soy, nuts, and wheat. I wrote about that conversation in a previous post:

We explained that we had good news; we now knew why Sammi’s food kept coming back into her mouth. Her esophagus was sick! We drew a body on paper, showed them where the esophagus was, drew a frown on it. We talked about allergies, about our friend’s daughter with celiac disease, about feeling crummy and then feeling better. We brought out the list of allowed foods and cheered along as favorites were listed.

At that young age, she was hardly able to comprehend it. Sammi ate what we gave her, followed the rules, and over the course of the next three-and-a-half years, endured more than a dozen endoscopies. She did everything we asked. She even participated in a barium swallow study and a strange and very uncomfortable CT scan without ever asking us why.

Sometimes, I feel horribly guilty that she never asked why. Continue Reading…

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Handouts for Doctors

Have you read my chart?Over and over in my head, I dissect what went wrong with my advocacy for my daughter.

When she was just six weeks old, we pushed to have her raspy, gurgling breathing evaluated by an otolaryngologist even though her pediatrician said it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing; we were justified in our followup.

When she was a year old, the sound of milk rattling in her throat got us another appointment with the otolaryngologist, and even though the pediatrician didn’t think it was strange that our one-year-old would not eat solid food yet, the otolaryngologist took note. The fact that she would hold one-fourth of a blueberry in her cheek for hours rather than swallow it was a sign that her esophagus was so narrow that even that sliver of food was too irritating to pass through. It was a clue. Somehow, I’d known to tell someone, and it was part of the path to diagnosing her vascular ring.

When she was four, we’d dutifully tried to wean her from her reflux medications, then taken her to a gastroenterologist when she responded poorly. We’d said yes to the endoscopies, accepted the diagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis, and diligently followed the six food elimination protocol. We read labels, scoured our kitchen, protected her from potential allergens like fierce animal parents. We did everything they asked, and advocated for her emotional well-being in school and with friends.

We did everything we could have done except tell her doctors to read her chart. If we had thought to ask them, hey, do you think this esophagus problem could have anything at all to do with her aortic arch?, that might have been all we needed. Continue Reading…

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Fragments and Money

fragmented winterBetween the December day when we received news of our daughter Sammi’s impending cardiac surgery and the surgery itself were nearly five fragmented, breath-holding months. During that time, life went on as usual: school, work, meals and concerts and the usual patterns of life with two children.

My days, already naturally broken into small chunks of varied activities, crumbled into bite-sized pieces of work and daily chores mixed with anxious Google searches and conversations over phone and email. In the autopilot that clicked on during repetitive activities like cooking or walking my children to school, I sometimes found myself unable to remember what had been happening in the previous ten minutes. How had I gotten to this corner? When did I add the onion to the pot?

Throughout, I was honest with friends and family about what was happening. Many had been with us for the Sammi’s entire medical journey. They had prayed and visualized a pink and smooth esophagus on each of her many endoscopy days. Some had arranged a spot in their pantry for a new, unused cutting board and disposable baking pans so that they could invite us for dinner during the hardest weeks of the six food elimination diet. These people were experiencing this with us, many of them nearly as deeply in love with Sammi as we were. They deserved to be in-the-know, and so I held very little back. We talked openly about the surgery and what it would entail; we shared whatever we knew and accepted their promises to hold us in their positive thoughts, whatever shape those took.

But some of them — more than a few of them — asked us the multimillion-dollar question: are you thinking about a lawsuit? Continue Reading…

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