{"id":5163,"date":"2026-01-26T10:19:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T13:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/26-01-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T10:22:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T13:22:20","slug":"26-01-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/26-01-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"26\/01\/2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hello, my little potato,<\/p>\n\n<p>Today, I&#8217;m writing to share the somewhat distressing events we&#8217;re currently experiencing.<\/p>\n\n<p>As I&#8217;ve said many times before, we&#8217;re having trouble getting you to eat. <\/p>\n\n<p>That doesn&#8217;t mean you don&#8217;t want to eat, but you&#8217;re not eating enough.<br\/>We don&#8217;t really know if it&#8217;s related to teething, if it&#8217;s behavioral, or if you have pain in your esophagus, or maybe something else?<\/p>\n\n<p>The problem is that, essentially, your condition, bronchiolitis obliterans, causes you to use more energy than a healthy child.<\/p>\n\n<p>This weekend, for the first time in a long time, you vomited. <br\/>The last time was when you had the tube without the pump, and we had asked the insurance for help, and they responded with a polite refusal from their legal department.<br\/>This time you had eaten, we gave you a medication (iron), and it made you vomit. <br\/>Strangely, it was also the first time I had gone to see friends since we got back from the hospital, and it was precisely at that moment that you vomited. <br\/>So you left Mom and the person helping her in a very stressful situation. You couldn&#8217;t breathe anymore. The speech therapist came. He suctioned you, and everything went well&#8230;   <\/p>\n\n<p>Today we weighed you, and you&#8217;ve lost weight. If we look at the complete curve since you had the tube removed, your weight isn&#8217;t increasing. You&#8217;re stagnating. And that raises a lot of questions for us.   <\/p>\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"736\" src=\"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/whatsapp-image-2026-01-26-at-08.55.53-1024x736.jpeg\" alt=\"Weight chart for a child with bronchiolitis obliterans\" class=\"wp-image-5158\" srcset=\"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/whatsapp-image-2026-01-26-at-08.55.53-1024x736.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/whatsapp-image-2026-01-26-at-08.55.53-300x216.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/whatsapp-image-2026-01-26-at-08.55.53-768x552.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/whatsapp-image-2026-01-26-at-08.55.53.jpeg 1494w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n<p>The options are clear:<br\/>1- Either you eat enough and your weight goes up,<br\/>2- Or you go back to having a nasogastric tube,<br\/>3- Or we move to a gastrostomy.<\/p>\n\n<p>Your pediatrician is leaning towards the third option, and it&#8217;s not the first time we&#8217;ve heard about it. <br\/>For those who don&#8217;t know, a gastrostomy is a hole in the abdomen directly connected to the stomach, with a tube through which the child is fed.<\/p>\n\n<p>Your mom and I would really like to avoid that. <br\/>We&#8217;ll do it if there&#8217;s no other choice. <\/p>\n\n<p>The problem with a gastrostomy is that there are risks of infection, at least one hospital stay, and daily care.<br\/>There are two narratives (I&#8217;m exaggerating a bit):<br\/>That of the doctors who say it&#8217;s wonderful.<br\/>And that of the parents who say it&#8217;s not so wonderful&#8230;<br\/>No one wants their child to have a hole in their belly to be fed&#8230;. <\/p>\n\n<p>But at the same time, we know that if you don&#8217;t eat and you catch the flu or any infection, it will be even worse. The slightest illness becomes a huge problem as soon as you refuse to eat. <\/p>\n\n<p>Today, I admit I&#8217;m depressed. And it constantly brings me back to all the mistakes and oversights of the past. The hatred returns, so I release it by going for a run.<br\/>I&#8217;m truly sorry, son. I don&#8217;t know what the future will look like. I wholeheartedly hope it will be beautiful. But I&#8217;m sorry for everything you have to go through.      <\/p>\n\n<p>Despite everything, we still had a nice moment this weekend. I&#8217;m trying to find some optimism&#8230;<br\/>Sunday, it was just the three of us.<br\/>And yesterday, I let you mix for the first time. Dad used to be a DJ, so I got out the turntables I had kept. We mixed together, and you love music and clapping your hands.   <\/p>\n\n<p>Your mom and I are going to give ourselves a little time. <br\/>It&#8217;s not an immediate emergency, but it&#8217;s a decision we need to think about seriously and quickly. <br\/>This week, we&#8217;re going to do everything we can to try and get you to gain weight. <br\/>We&#8217;re going to change how we do things, adapt again, and do our best.<\/p>\n\n<p>I love you<\/p>\n\n<p>Dad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, my little potato, Today, I&#8217;m writing to share the somewhat distressing events we&#8217;re currently experiencing. As I&#8217;ve said many times before, we&#8217;re having trouble getting you to eat. That doesn&#8217;t mean you don&#8217;t want to eat, but you&#8217;re not eating enough.We don&#8217;t really know if it&#8217;s related to teething, if it&#8217;s behavioral, or if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs-of-a-heros-dad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5167,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5163\/revisions\/5167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopeforgabriel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}