May Her Memory Be A Blessing
On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, Becca Arielle Pava, age 35, passed away peacefully at home due to complications from an...
Losing Weight and Sanity
When I was fifteen I finally fell off the growth charts for weight. I had been teetering at the fifth percentile for a while, but at fifteen my weight dropped so low for my height that I completely fell off. Due to my gastroparesis anything I ate, I vomited back up. If I didn’t puke it up it sat in my stomach without getting digested for days, it it got digested at all. Because none of the typical treatments for gastroparesis were working it was no surprise that I was rapidly losing weight.
I had tried all the medications they made for gastroparesis, I had tried a million different diets, and I had tried meditation, but nothing worked. On and off I would have NJ tubes placed, but the NJ tube feeding gave me really bad diarrhea and I couldn’t absorb certain nutrients through my digestive tract anymore. Besides, at the beginning of the year when I was fifteen and losing weight rapidly, I didn’t have an NJ tube in.
About all I could tolerate in a day was one Pediasure and one Pedialyte.
Dr. Sampson and Dr. Kaye had a little conference about me and then Dr. Kaye called up my mom telling her she wanted me to come in for an appointment.
Pediatric Emergency Room
My dad’s arms were wrapped firmly around me as he held me while talking to the lady at the desk at the entrance to the pediatric emergency room. About twenty minutes earlier I had passed out in an elevator on the way out of Dr. Monroe’s office. The vampire lady in her lab had just sucked out her usual four tubes of blood from the crook of my arm. When she was done she gave me a unicorn sticker, and I stepped into the elevator. The next thing I remembered being aware of was my dad leaning over me yelling my name in a panic. He had picked me up in his arms like a baby, not the ten-year-old girl I was, and carried me out to the car. I didn’t fully wake up until we were racing down the turnpike toward the hospital.