The story of Tracy-lee
A few weeks after I was born, I refused to feed. My mommy thought there was something wrong with her breast milk and decided to put me on formula. I still refused to feed. My mommy was becoming more and more stressed as I was losing weight and not growing as I should. She took me to the Paediatrician who ran a basket of tests and put it down as reflux. He sent us home with medication but I still would feed. I then went for my 6 week check up at the local clinic and they immediately sent me to a state hospital due to failure to thrive. They ran all sorts of tests , fed me through a nasogastric tube but came up with nothing. He admitted me again, performed the same tests to see if he missed something. He then decided to cut out the formula and put me on solids at only 7 weeks old. He said that I am just a strong-willed baby and I know what I want. He got in a speech therapist to determine whether I had a problem with swallowing or aspirating. This speech therapist was alarmed at the fact that I was being fed solids at 7 weeks old and asked my mommy to take me to a different Paediatrician so that someone with fresh eyes could take a look at me. My mommy then moved me to a different hospital. The new Paediatrician also ran all the tests possible and she determined that I had gastroparesis(delayed stomach emptying). She put me on medication but still I had failure to thrive, still I wasn’t feeding, still I was vomiting the little I was managing to get in through the nasogastric tube, still my mommy was watching me waste away helplessly. The Paediatrician then sent me to get a gastrostomy tube so that I could be fed through there. I started vomiting violently during/after every feed. Nomatter how they spaced out the feeds, how slow it went, how gravitational it was, with various millilitres. I was then hooked onto a feeding machine from 8pm to 6am and bolus feeds during the day. Still the projectile vomiting continued. I was always lethargic and dehydrated because of it.