H. Denson

Not long ago, my son Luke started to complain about stomach pain. He would sometimes stop in the middle of play, look at us with his pitiful face and say “my tummy hurt.” We were really at a loss as to what we should do. I had told our GI who wanted to give it some time. One month later, his tummy was still hurting, and I insisted that our GI do something about it. After much discussion, we decided to do a endoscopy and colonoscopy.

These procedures involve running a tube with a camera down the throat and up the rectum to take pictures of the digestive tract. They look for any abnormalities or polyps and take very small biopsies. The child is under anesthesia during the procedure, so they have no idea what is going on, and they have no memory of it.

The day before, we had to put Luke on an all-liquid diet. He could only have clear fluids such as Kool-Aid, apple juice, clear sodas, clear broths, Jello, and all of the Popsicles that he could eat. They told us to make sure that nothing he ate contained red food dye since that could show up as blood during the procedures. When he woke up on prep day, we fed him a huge breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and sausage. He wasn’t scheduled until 9 AM the next day, so we had until 9 that morning to feed him as much as possible before the liquid diet started. Once it did, we offered him something every hour to keep his stomach full of liquid so that he wouldn’t feel so hungry. I also dropped his younger brother and sister off with their grandmother since we did not feel that it was fair for Luke to see the other children eating, and they were too small to understand why they should not eat in front of their brother. We spend a good part of the day in distraction mode to take his mind off the fact that he was only consuming clear liquids. My husband took him to a movie in the theater, we rented a new movie, we played games and did whatever we could to keep him happy and distracted.

The hardest part was giving him the medication to cleanse out his colon. It was recommended that we give him magnesium citrate. We had heard from several people that it was pretty nasty medicine, so I called my doctor and they told us we could give him Miralax which is tasteless, gentler, and usually does the trick. Honestly, we probably started too late because I think Miralax takes longer to work than the other medicines, but we gave him several doses mixed into whatever drink he had requested over the course of 4 hours starting at 4:30 PM the night before the procedures. He drank it with little fuss, probably wondering why we were so insistent that he drink all of his Sprite. The hardest part were giving him the suppositories. It is near impossible to give a four year old who is all ready afraid of medications a suppository. He screamed “No Thank You, No Thank You” the entire time while we held him down and squeezed his little bottom together to keep it in. It worked fairly quickly. We had to do it again at 4 AM the morning of the procedure. We were honestly afraid that he was going to have a heart attack, but it was easier. His being half asleep probably helped.

On the day of the procedure, we arrived at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital at the bright and early time of 6 AM. I swear some hospital staff are way too happy to be awake at that time of day. We checked in, and were called back. Luke got a special pair of pajamas and a stuffed gorilla to add to his collection of simian creatures (The kid has a thing for monkeys). He played around in a child sized car until it was time to go. When they came to get him, they let him “drive” his car back to the operating room. He didn’t even miss us.

Recovery was hard for Luke. It always is. He took a long time to wake up and when he did you would have thought that we were the meanest creatures on earth for disturbing his rest. He cried and proclaimed that he did not want to go home. I’m really hoping that that was the drugs talking because who would want to stay at the place where all of the “pokies” happen? Eventually he came to his senses. They required him to eat or drink something before we left, and they warned us not to let him climb our stairs by himself or leave him alone for long periods of time since the medications that they had given him could cause him to lose his balance easily. By the time dinner rolled around, we had our little boy back to normal.

The tests came back clear of any physical issues. We are still at a loss as to what is causing the stomach pain, but lately it has been better. We just hope and pray that we never have to put him through that again and that the stomach pain is gone for good.