All families I know develop — unconsciously — a vocabulary specific to them. This can include everything from pet names to invented foods to the life-long adoption of mispronunciations from toddlerhood. Being in a nuclear family — a new nuclear family, not the one in which we grew up — is, in many ways, like having a glorious lifetime membership in a club in which we got to make all the rules and invite in all the members ourselves. By nature, it is empowering for the adult.
The innocence of this family vocabulary can seem silly from the outside because, most of the time, these new words are like long-standing and elaborate inside jokes. We have words like that in our family, too. The exception, for us, is the word “urp.”
“Urp” is the word we invented to describe the sound Sammi made when she had what we assumed to be reflux. Babies with reflux are a known entity — the baby silently jostles his own torso up and then — sometimes also silently — a stream of spit-up drools out, to be wiped away by an ever-present burp cloth. Sometimes, this baby-reflux interferes with sleep and comfort and so the baby is given reflux medication. This was what happened to Sammi at six weeks old; her reflux was silent and, oddly, never resulted in spitting up. She constantly smelled like sour baby vomit, but it was on her breath and not making up to her mouth.
Her pediatrician put her on a reflux medication. It got changed once when she was around a year old, then again at two years old, when our efforts to take her off of it were met with the constant sound we named “Urp.” The pediatrician — and we — had expected her to grow out of it, as babies do, but whenever she stopped taking it, there it was again: “urp.” It was a gurgling sound, followed by a hard swallow and a series of coughs. It was unnerving.
When she got old enough to talk, we would sometimes ask her about it. We’d hear “urp” and ask if she was ok.
“Jus’ my cereal,” she’d chirp, going back to her toys.
“It’s jus’ my yogurt.”
“It’s my dinner in my mouth,” she’d say as we pulled her pajamas over her head.
It didn’t seem to bother her. Sometimes it was eight or ten times per day. She never vomited, she never complained of pain, she never woke up gagging. Still, we worried about it. We had her bed propped up on an angle, gave her first the antacids and then the proton pump inhibitors. The medicine made the sound less frequent than when she was off the medicine, but nothing truly made it stop.
Urp. Just my breakfast.
Urp. Just raspberries.
We asked ourselves constantly, is she urping more lately? Why is she still urping? She’s three. Shouldn’t she have outgrown this?
We worried. We were professional worriers. Her pediatrician, both perplexed and long-accustomed to the mysteries of childhood illness and behavior, just kept telling us to wait a few more months and try again to take her off the medication. We repeated that cycle for years.
Urp. Just noodles.
Urp. Just water.
Just wait. So we waited.
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After ten endoscopies, a year of restricted diets, nearly six years of medication to block acid production in her stomach, diagnosis with an inflammatory disorder called eosinophilic esophagitis, and dozens of trips to gastroenterologists, my eight-year-old daughter slid under an x-ray machine, drank some barium, and lit up the screen with a reveal of her esophagus, kinked into utterly unnatural shapes. After the radiologist told me in a hushed voice that the indentations in her esophagus were coming from her aorta, snaking its way across the back of her body, I began to put all the pieces together on my own.
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