He careened through the halls on a motorcycle, racing the other children. He got a toy medical cart and he ran to nurses and checked their vital signs. Nathan wasn't old enough yet to feel that this was unfair. We ran after him through the halls, pushing his IV pole.īecause through all of this, he was still running. We lived in the children's ward at Cornell in New York City. Hole after hole appeared in my child's body. They inserted a G-J tube so we could pump sustenance directly into his intestines. They cut his pyloric valve to help his stomach empty. Wronger.) They put a central line into his artery so they could feed him TPN, which is fancy Gatorade. Each time, I thought: this could be the time when things go wrong. Again and again I walked him into the operating room, clutching his teddy bear, so the surgeons could try procedure after procedure. He grew weak and pale, surviving on an IV drip. It's called gastroparesis, and it was just bad luck. Nathan's stomach stopped working altogether. What followed was a month-long nightmare. Over the next year, he had two operations to pull everything back down and tighten that hole. All things considered, this is a fixable problem.

His stomach, and most of his intestines, had slipped up around his lungs. He had a hiatal hernia: the hole for his esophagus was too big. It could be bad or it could be the end of the world. There's a universe of possibilities about that shadow. What could the shadow be? It could be anything. 'We saw a shadow on your son's lungs,' is what they told us.

Miss rumphius