Calgary Herald
Page B3
It only takes 30 seconds for 11-year-old Danielle Taylor to shove a feeding tube up her nose, down her throat and into her stomach before crawling into bed at night. That tube will pump food into her body for 10 hours.
“The feeding tube isn’t a regular regimen I have to do every single night,” she said, adding she takes weekends off to go to sleepovers and try to live a normal life.
Danielle, the new poster child for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada, has Crohn’s disease, which causes inflammation in the digestive tract, most commonly in the small intestine.
The inflammation causes pain, cramps and diarrhea. It can also lead to bleeding, weight loss and fever.
It’s a disease that is quite common in adults, but not many people know it also affects children. Since the disease causes bleeding and weight loss and doesn’t allow for the proper absorption of vitamins and minerals, growth can sometimes be stunted and development delayed.
That’s why doctors are recommending Danielle stay on the feeding tube for two years until she gains enough weight for her to safely enter puberty.
She is three or four pounds shy of what she should weigh at her age. The problem is keeping the weight on.
“If she goes off the tube, sometimes her weight goes back down again,” said her mother, Lori Taylor.
Danielle’s symptoms started two years ago.
“After dinner, I’d get cramps. They were really bad,” she said.
Doctors suspected it was a food allergy, and her parents cut out various food groups before they found out dairy products were the trigger.
After a battery of tests at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, doctors determined Danielle had Crohn’s disease, and put her on corticosteroids to control the swelling. She is now in remission.
Danielle accepts the disease, but she misses her formerly carefree childhood.
“When I’m at a friend’s house and they have a cookie, I’ll have a banana. I kind of wish I could have the cookie, but I know I can’t,” she said.
Her mother is often frustrated that she can’t help her daughter get better.
“I find it hard when she’s suffering because there’s nothing we can do to comfort her,” she said. “When she’s having cramps she doesn’t want to be touched, so I can’t go and hug her or anything.”
But Danielle doesn’t let the disease bring her down.
She keeps drawing and takes jazz, hip-hop and funk dancing lessons. She even wants to model and was in a Storybook Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.
Her favourite subject is science, and she can’t wait to start junior high next year. She aspires to be a psychologist.
“I love helping people and figuring out why people do things,” she said.
Her mother is optimistic.
“We pray for a cure every time we break a wishbone,” she said.
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Copyright 2002 CanWest Global
