Marcia Colvin is eager to hear her daughter’s pretty singing voice again.
RaeAnah Eidson, who was born with a rare heart condition, knows more about physical pain and discomfort than most 12-year-old girls. She struggles to get a good breath. And that once pretty singing voice is quiet now, because carrying melodies is too much of strain on her body.
“She used to sing and we’d go to churches and sing as a family and she cannot sing a song now,” said Colvin. “Halfway through the song she’ll start (catching her breath).”
But her struggles will hopefully get better soon.
The Madison County Middle School sixth grader, who loves talking with her friends and designing clothes, will travel to Cincinnati with her mother for a procedure in June to relieve a pulsating mass on her trachea that doctors say is blocking 50 to 55 percent of her wind pipe.
The condition is somewhat complicated. And Colvin has a thick binder full of medical documents that tell the long story of her daughter’s medical troubles.
Eidson was born with a “double-aortic arch,” meaning she had two aortas at birth. A surgery was performed on her heart when she was 13 weeks old.
But Eidson’s breathing difficulties persisted. And in 2008, she had another surgery in Florida. According to a letter to Colvin from Children’s Cardiovascular Medicine, the surgeon “was surprised to find the double aortic arch anatomy intact after supposedly she had it repaired at 13 weeks of life at Egleston.”
“The doctor in ‘99 had gone in through her back had supposedly sliced it and tied it off so it wouldn’t be a problem,” said Colvin. “But the doctor (in 2008) said none of that had been done. And so the pressure that was supposed to be taken off her trachea in 1999 wasn’t. So now it’s caused permanent damage, because it’s been there for so long.”
Colvin said the doctor in 2008 tried to fix the problem.
“But the same thing is happening again,” said Colvin. “There’s a pulsating mass beating into her trachea. And the bronchoscopy in October 2011 showed that there was about 50 to 55 percent of her trachea being obstructed.”
Now, Eidson will see a team of six specialists in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who will try to repair the problem for good.
“The doctors will be in the room at the same time so they can all see the same thing,” said Colvin.
The procedure is set for June 18, but Eidson will need to get there a couple of weeks early. She said she’s glad the operation won’t come until June.
“I don’t want to miss school,” she said, adding that she likes playing with her friends.
But Eidson is ready to feel better.
“It’s just a shortness of breath,” she said. “It stays for awhile. I go outside and do things, because I feel like it. But I learned my lesson.”
Colvin said her daughter is often on oxygen.
“She has no energy,” said Colvin.
Colvin said she’s not asking anyone for money. She just wants her daughter to get some community kindness as she faces a hard time. She noted that kids have questioned the scar on her daughter’s chest and she wants those children to understand why it’s there.
“My whole thing is people have been supportive and they give hugs and they so ‘Oh, I’ve been praying for you,’” said Colvin. “I just want people to know what she’s going through.”
Colvin, a single mother of four, said her daughter’s medical struggles have unified her family.
“Our closeness, our bond because of all that we’ve been through is amazing and the kids are what keep me going,” she said.
This kind of thing is rampant in the medical industry. Hospitals are lax, infections spread, surgeons don't care enough to pay attention to what they are doing; doctors have thrown out the "art" of medicine in favor of the minimalist A plus B equals C approach that keeps them from getting sued. They don't care any more that patients get better or get well. They just move those patients through the system as fast as possible in order to do as many procedures as they can, needed or not, in order to get reimbursed by insurance. As long as they don't do anything wrong it's okay to not do anything right.
RaeAnah's ordeal is getting to be more the norm than the exception. This is so profoundly wrong on many levels, medically, morally, professionally. My respect for the medical industry has been plummeting for the past 16 years. We have got to do whatever it takes to get this industry to do right, to be efficient, to be thorough, to be worth the huge amounts of money they cost us. Is that going to be ObamaCare? Is it going to be single payer? Is it going to be universal healthcare? Whatever it is going to be, it can't be what we have now or there will be lots more RaeAnahs suffering unnecessarily!
I wish RaeAnah a whole new life of vigor and energy that she has never known before. I hope her new medical team does right by her; we are all watching with critical eyes!