Isabella's Tummy Troubles
Watching your child suffer and feeling powerless to stop it has to be one of the hardest parts of being a parent. Isabella has been dealing with chronic stomach pain for almost a year, and so far we’ve found no clear cause or solution for her problem. (For those wondering, this is her only constant symptom. She’s not vomiting, she doesn’t have diarrhea, and she’s not bleeding internally). We have taken her to the doctor more times than we can count, which is no small task. The clinic we frequent most is the best in town, but it's usually crowded and the wait is normally at least a couple hours. And when we took her to the hospital (for an endoscopy), the wait would have been even longer, were it not for our inside connection with Dr. Alain, the cardiologist who also happens to be an elder at the Baptist church in town. In this culture, when a sick person sees a doctor, he wants to go home with a prescription medication to fix the problem, and doctors tend to oblige. But the thing is, we don’t want to merely mask Isabella’s symptoms. We want to get to the bottom of them and address them once and for all.
We also recently discovered that the two specialists we’d been seeing turned out to be generalists in internal medicine, and not gastroenterologists. This may explain why they’ve drawn a blank despite all the tests and procedures Isabella has undergone. We recently met with a gastroenterologist in Dakar, who didn't add much to what her predecessors had said. We are at a loss. We had more tests done, per this specialist's request. The next step may require us to seek medical attention outside of Senegal. Would you pray with us that the Lord would grant us wisdom and allow us to swiftly deal with a painful condition that our little sweetie has endured for so long?
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