[Source: Sydney Morning Herald]
More and more children are having serious trouble doing what should come naturally – eating. Linda Morris reports.
As Joshua Davies squirms, agitated and crying in his mother’s arms, Amy-Lee Davies looks about the clinical room at the four health specialists, her eyes pleading.
Her youngest son is 14 months old, and in his young life, not a piece of food has passed his lips. He doesn’t know the simple pleasure of eating although he is teething, nor does he know the taste of salty, spicy or sweet food on his tongue.
Formula milk is fed through a tube that enters his nasal passage, snakes down his oesophagus and empties into his stomach in much the same way as saline is fed through a drip. He is attached to this feeding pump 20 hours a day. But constipation and the onset of a cold is complicating treatment. Amy-Lee has survived on one hour’s sleep from the night before.
Joshua, from Richmond, is attending the feeding clinic of the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, one of many infants aged under one whose medical conditions requires tube feeding.
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