spacer The doctor wanted to operate on Hannah to make it impossible for her to vomit ever again so that she would keep the formula down. Tiffany refused, appalled at the idea of forcing Hannah's body to retain something that it was so violently rejecting.

Tiffany's relationship with Hannah's doctors and nurses went downhill from there.

Tiffany was soon ordered to leave the feeding to the nurses. Then they wrote in Hannah's records that Tiffany had failed to feed her. They wrote that Hannah was tolerating the formula well, when in fact she continued to vomit as before.

When Hannah's feeding tube was replaced, Tiffany saw from the markings on the new tube that it had been inserted 6 centimeters into Hannah's belly. She was alarmed because the previous one had been inserted 2 centimeters. She repeatedly asked over several days if the new tube had been inserted too far. Her questions were brushed off.

Hannah had stopped vomiting once the new tube had gone in, but after 10 days an X-ray showed that the tube had been inserted so far that it went past Hannah's stomach and was dumping food directly into her intestine. She was being starved because food bypassed her stomach and left her system too quickly; this mistake also could have destroyed her intestines.

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June 12 , 2011

If your concerns are being ignored, run, don't walk to a new doctor

by Elizabeth L. Bewley

Sometimes healthcare hurts more than it helps. Consider the case of Hannah, a baby born with several serious medical issues.

The problem that put Hannah in intensive care on and off for most of the first three months of her life was that she couldn't seem to keep anything down. Because her mother, Tiffany, did not produce enough breastmilk to meet the baby's needs, Hannah was fed a combination of formula and breastmilk. She vomited up almost everything after every feeding.

One rare weekend when Hannah was home from the hospital, Tiffany tried an experiment. She gave Hannah only breastmilk. Miraculously, Hannah kept down every feeding for two whole days. But on Monday, Tiffany had to start feeding the baby the formula that had been prescribed for her to give her enough calories. Hannah promptly started throwing up again.

Back in the hospital, Tiffany reported on her experiment. The doctor said, "That's impossible. The formula is hypoallergenic. Nobody has a problem with this formula."