Category Archives: motherhood

Second Guessing and Seventeenth Procedure

Ibodiesn the years since my daughter’s medical mystery was solved, I’ve struggled to silence the what-if voices that whisper to me in quiet moments. What if we’d figured this all out when she was two? What if we’d figured it out when she was four? What if we’d figured it out at five? What if her care had been managed by a multi-disciplinary team from the very beginning?

These what-ifs serve no purpose. They don’t change anything about the moment I inhabit right now, a moment in which Sammi, my resilient, remarkable kid is currently riding an enormous horse with her best friend after gobbling pizza with her last night and sharing pancakes with her this morning. Her legs fill in her jeans, her cheeks are full and bright and sun-kissed, and I am truly, honestly, not worried about her. The what-ifs can’t touch that. They can’t touch her future.

Still. Continue Reading…

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Oversharing, Awareness, and the Muddled Middle

http://mamalode.com/story/detail/how-blood-dancesWhen my medically complicated daughter was only a few years old, a close family member said something that I’ve never been able to forget. I’ve thought about it often, especially as I’ve been writing about my daughter so publicly.

This family member was a new parent with a fussy, unhappy baby. He was complaining that nothing he and his wife were doing to soothe their baby was helping, and I asked if they’d asked any of the parents in their new baby group for ideas.

“No,” he said, “we’re just more private.”

“But maybe someone knows of something — a product or a position or something — that might help,” I countered.

“Look, that’s not how we are,” he answered. “That’s more you. You’d tell any random stranger in your kid’s kindermusic class all about her medical problems no matter what they’d think about you.”

At the time, I felt slapped. I felt hurt, and I felt judged. The tone with which this was delivered was so derisive, as though I was indiscriminately blurting out the story of Sammi’s first cardiac surgery to anyone who didn’t run away when I opened my mouth. It made me feel like an embarrassment.  Continue Reading…

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Summer and What to Do

summer chair at the lakeIt is summer here in the midwest, and like nearly every summer for the last nine years, I’m balancing conflicting impulses: to work as hard as I can in every moment my children’s schedules and propensity for all-day-tv-watching will allow, and to spend as much quality time as possible with my children while they still want to spend time with me.

We’ve had memorably difficult summers, of course, like the summer when Sammi, the sunshine of this blog’s title, began the first and most restrictive phase of her six-food-elimination-diet for eosinophilic esophagitis, and the summer after her aortopexy surgery, when I took her for feeding therapy every week. Those were sunny days with metaphorical thunderstorms always looming.

This summer, though, is as perfect a summer as I can imagine. Everyone is healthy. Both my daughters have just the right amount of independence and connection, and I am writing this from the window of a coffeeshop where Sammi left me on her way to day camp. She’ll pick me up later. I have a full slate of work, a hot latte, and not a single doctor appointment on our calendar for the foreseeable future. Continue Reading…

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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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