Emilie Lyne

For the first seven years of our married life I can honestly say nothing bad ever came our way. In seven years we had not even had a heated argument. Everything was as perfect as it could be when living on planet earth. I was pregnant with my first child, I had an ideal part time teaching job waiting for me after my maternity leave and we were moving into the house of our dreams. On the day of our house move the first bomb shell hit us my husband came home with the removal lorry and the news that his firm was closing down and we would be moved to the south of France. Richard was born two weeks later and we moved to Vence in France when Richard was just five months old. It took a while to settle in but with the help of other English couples sent to live in the same area from my husbands company we started to enjoy it. We soon decided that we wanted to try and settle down so we started a house building

I was three months pregnant with my second child before we found out. Emilie has always surprised us. We had not planned to have our children so close together but we were thrilled. I found an English speaking doctor and the pregnancy went well with some contractions at six months causing me to need a ton of medication and as much "feet up" as possible. Emilie was born on the day I stopped taking the medication which was three weeks before the due date. She came quickly, it was all over in just 1 and a half hours with no pain relief at all. That first night she fed long and hard and slept well too. The next morning I was pleased to see her still sleeping but anxious to feed her. This time she was uninterested and what little went in soon came back out of her mouth.

When the doctor who had delivered her came to see us I expressed a little concern. The doctor said to expect her to be exhausted as it was a quick birth and she was three weeks early. Another doctor came to check her over the following day I tried to explain to him in my feeble French that the baby was not feeding and was spitting up a lot. The doctor checked her over and said everything was fine. I knew that the baby had not passed the maconium but that some had come out on a nurses thermometer. I tried all the next day to feed my sleepy Emilie, breast bottle nothing worked. That night Emilie puked up on me so often that I had nothing left to wear and I found myself crying alone in a hospital where none of the nurses could speak English. I pressed my red button to get help. I said the French words for sick baby and they took Emilie to the nursery and sent me back to bed. The next morning out of the blue a Scottish nurse came into my room (a real Florence Nightingale) She'd lived in France a long time and was a Midwife at the hospital. At last we were communicating. She called in a new pediatrician for a second opinion. The new doctor discovered that Emilie had both a small hole in the heart and that her stomach was like a balloon, which she thought could be as a result of an infection. Emilie was sent immediately to Lenval hospital in Nice. While the Scottish midwife called my husband to come quickly.

It was a shocking experience to walk into the intensive care baby unit to see our new baby with tubes in every orifice and the wires, monitors etc. What was even more difficult was that again there was no one there who could speak English and Kevin and I really couldn't understand exactly what was happening. The French hospital was very different from hospitals we had known in the past with very restricted visiting times, no room for mums and our other child, 15 month old Richard not permitted the unit.

Richard started to become very anxious by the new situation. Mum and dad leaving him everyday with different people. We lived in a different country so our family could not be there to help at the time. Richard got to a point where he cried every time I got out of a seat or moved to a different room at home. He had not even seen the baby who was now turning his world upside-down.

Initially the doctors treated Emilie as if she had an infection. The swelling of her tummy went down as I was not feeding Emilie. The doctors thought it was the antibiotics dealing with the infection. A few days later they let me feed Emilie and she vomited and ballooned again. This time the doctors thought it could be Hirchsprungs, you should have seen them try and explain that to us in French. After biopsies it was confirmed and the surgeon who was to perform the op. came and explained to us in English what was going to happen. Emilies surgeon really was excellent and somehow I found it comforting to hear him say he had a daughter of his own called Emilie. On the day of the operation no one could tell us what was happening even after the op the intensive care unit was not able to tell us what the doctor had found or what had been done. In desperation I remember us ringing the surgeon at home. He gave us good news Emilie had a very mild short segment of H.D. he had only needed to remove 10cm's of colon. No colostomy to deal with Emilie came home a week after he operation a month exactly after her birth date which was August 24th 1995. On that September 24th evening we celebrated with a wine and pizza party. Our friends who had helped us were there to meet our special baby. When you have been to a place where you really believe that your baby could die and you have cried yourself to sleep for on and off for a month the homecoming is really a special thing.

While Emilie had been in hospital I had been expressing milk but I was not producing much by the time she came home. I also had by other child who need more than his share of attention. We soon had Emilie on bottles and she began to thrive. She started well on solids too but as time went on bowel movements became alarmingly frequent and loose. By the time Emilie was 1.5 years she could do 50b.m's in a day. You can imagine what kind of a rash we were dealing with. As soon as I had her clean she was dirty again. What also upset us was that she was cramping and screaming with pain everytime. Of course we were at the doctors everyweek. We saw the surgeon and an allergy specialist but they said she was growing well and not to bee too concerned the surgery was good and there was nothing fundamentally wrong. You can imagine we were at breaking point. We took her forward to be prayed for at a healing meeting and afterwards the idea came to be that we should take all dairy products out of her diet...BINGO!!! we went down to an average of 6 a day and no more cramps. We went on like this for another year and then were asked by my husbands work to move to Dallas in the U.S.

We decided to seek some opinion about Emilie here as Emilie was not making any progress towards becoming potty trained. Emilie has tried many medicines, propulsid, Flagyl etc but nothing was improving the situation. Then we had 10 days where Emilie went back to having the cramps and the continual b.m's and rash. By this time I had found the Guardian Society and I poured my heart out in the chat room and found lots of great advice and support there. Drying bottoms with hairdryers is a good one..Philips with Mineral oil worked well too. The G.I decided Emilie need further biopsies to see if she still had Hirshsprungs. The colonoscopy and biopsies showed that the operation in France was 100% a success. There was no reason why Emilie should be having problems. The doctor put me in contact with a potty training specialist who asked me to put Emilie on a high wheat bran diet. I thought this was crazy, Emilie was doing so many loose b.m's as it was. We tried it in the form of a breakfast cereal called Weetabix which we made with hot soya milk. BINGO for the second time...Emilie suddenly had the sensation before the action and was able to take herself to the bathroom. She is going to be four in August and she will be able to go to pre-school with out her nappies (Diapers) Emilies bowel movements have decreased in number and we have only had one small accident in the past three weeks. I think I can at last say that Emilie is potty trained and that the only difficulties that she now has is in the slightly restricted diet. I know that Emilie is very lucky and our struggles have been short but I believe that there is hope ...When it seems that a solution can never be found it can be just around the corner. Thank you all my new friends at the Guardian Society for helping us to get to this point without loosing our minds first.

If I can help anyone please feel free to contact me at kevinlyne@earthlink.net