Claire is still feeling nauseous and vomiting after eating. She threw up a lot over Christmas break, and when she started back to school in January she threw up at school several times and called me to pick her up. We took her back to the surgeon, who ordered an esophagram that showed the nissen fundoplication repair was still intact, but that her stomach was emptying slowly.
He referred us back to the GI doctor who suspects that it is gastroparesis and ordered a stomach emptying test. Claire ate some scrambled eggs mixed with a small amount of radioactive material, and the plan was to watch it for several hours to see how long it took to empty out of her stomach. But… Claire got sick and threw up the eggs after about 1.5 hours, at which point they had to stop the test.
The GI doctor is going to go ahead and treat Claire for gastroparesis. We’ve already been doing the diet changes, and she prescribed erythromycin to hopefully stimulate Claire’s stomach muscles to move food through her stomach better. We picked up the prescription today. One of the side effects could be diarrhea, so we shall see.
If that doesn’t work, she is going to do another endoscopy in February to take a look around, and while in there she may inject some Botox into the pyloric muscles at the bottom of her stomach, which will hopefully relax them and allow food to pass through more easily.
In the meantime, Claire is back on homebound instruction until March. She is so over all of this. She just wants to eat and go to school and hang out with her friends and be a normal middle schooler. She is sick of feeling nauseous and throwing up all the time, and going to doctors. She missed a school dance this week, will miss the 7th grade trip to Tremont, and will miss out on getting a part in the drama class musical this spring.