Day 1: Camp Nom Nom

Day 1 of 30

We are in Dallas, TX at Our Children's House at Baylor. It's a pediatric facility that helps kids with trauma and birth disorders. They have a special intensive feeding program where kids are admitted in with the sole purpose of learning to eat, despite difficulties life has thrown at them. Olivia is such a kid. She's had severe GERD (reflux) her whole life and it just won't seem to go away. With all that throwing up, she's not so interested in eating. Who eats when they are nauseous and spilling their guts EVERY day, several times a day? Well, not this kid! She's diagnosed with "oral aversion" to food - any kind at all.

So she's been on the G-tube for 8+ months now, getting milk pumped directly into her stomach. That's no way to live. So she has been enrolled into the inpatient program, with hopes that she will come out of the hospital eating some food and can wean off the tube. I am staying with her and Denver and Sophie will come up on weekends.

Grandma buying me a "friend" at Bucee's

Today, we arrived at BOOT CAMP for orientation. We brought Sophie and Grandma for moral support. It was a whole bunch of nurses, speech therapists, doctors, occupational therapists, nutritionists and feeding techs talking at us about what would happen. We got assigned a room (with no bed for mama), told to use a shared toilet and communal bath (eeps!), and then spent the rest of the day being told how they were changing everything about her eating.

The program is intensive for a reason: they make kids do the ONE thing they hate: eat. All these kiddos are on tubes and they like it that way. Less work and less pain (for them). Boot camp says they eat 4 times a day and go to 2-3 therapy sessions. To us, that's pretty demanding for a week, nevermind a day. It's basically wake up (early), eat, therapy, eat, nap, eat, therapy, eat, bath, go to sleep. Oh, the buckets of tears that will be shed! And Olivia has nothing if she doesn't have crocodile tears.

Playing in the new bed before being separated

Today was just evaluation and getting stuff set up. They watched us feed her two times and made notes, or as I suspect, judgements on how we're doing it wrong. Here are a few things I can share about the experience so far:

- Communal bath sucks. We have requested to move rooms as soon as one becomes available.
- Lots of kids have it worse than us. She doesn't have a whole slew of medical/developmental issues, too.
- So many toys and play times! Sophie is gonna wish she had an eating problem.
- Kids are messy and dirty. Lots of kids mean everything is just gross. No matter that it's a hospital; it's always dirty.
- We miss our other half of the family. Denver and Sophie left and Olivia tried to follow and cried when she couldn't. So did I.
- A hospital provides beds and linens, but it ain't no hotel!