OK, this is a not sexy subject at all that I am going to talk to you about today. Two words, to describe the following.
Pain and poo.
(Did you laugh when you read the word poop? That’s normal. Even the doctors who are in this column laugh a little, when the word is spoken.)
There you go, I’m going to talk to you about inflammatory bowel disease in children. Ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, etc.
Fear not, this is also a cheerful column on a happy team of doctors from Sainte-Justine.
* * *
The DD Véronique Groleau shows me her office, very small, at 6e floor of Sainte-Justine. She is a gastroenterologist. One of the 12 doctors in the hospital’s gastroenterology-hepatology department. More than 8000 children pass through the department each year for bowel and stomach ailments …
We say that, like that, “gastroenterology”; I tell you that, like that, “Crohn’s disease” and “ulcerative colitis”, we read these words without striking a blow.
But behind these words, believe me, there are mountains of suffering.
Children who cannot digest what they eat. So which do not grow as they should, they do not retain the nutrients necessary for growth. Who suffer. And that we hospitalize punctually.
A life, often folded in half, too, while waiting to find a treatment, the right one. It can be long.
And there is the embarrassment, too …
You are 8, 10, 12 years old, you are sick, your stomach hurts, you go to the toilet 10 times a day, you have diarrhea …
It’s no fun having to explain the nature of your poop to your friends.
It’s embarassing.
* * *
I come back to those words I just wrote above.
Mountains of suffering, speaking of inflammatory bowel disease.
Flashback, 1983. Perhaps on the radio there was Every Breath You Take by The Police or I love you like crazy from Charlebois. I am 11 years old. And my mother is folded in half in her bed, in the half-light of her room. My mother had Crohn’s disease.
She was diagnosed soon after I was born. It was the ball that dragged her all her life to the depths of chronic suffering. She fought with all her might not to sink.
Operations, new drugs, hospitalizations, flirtations with death, more new drugs …
Ninety-five pounds all wet: her body wasn’t absorbing all the nutrients she needed.
Diarrhea, vomiting. Don’t feel like eating.
And despite that, even folded in half, I did not miss anything: neither a hockey training, nor a game soccer, nothing, never, and above all I never lacked love: “Rub my back, Kick, it’s going to do me good, we’ll go to your game after …”
I patted her back. She said it made her stomach aches go away. I think above all that it gave him courage.
I was telling you about the embarrassment of children, at the idea of explaining their illness, of necessarily talking about poop …
I still have a very precise memory of the flatulence (don’t laugh!) Of my mother, who of course passed gas all day long, bent in half.
My mother was the most tough who ever walked on this Earth.
* * *
The DD Groleau shows me a huge piece of paper on the wall, as big as a to post. You know that roll of white paper on the doctor’s examination table. The DD Groleau tore a piece of it a meter long. The surface is scribbled in felt-tip pen: this is all the logistics of the “Gala des petits belly” that she organizes with her medical colleagues from the gastrohepato unit of Sainte-Justine.
The Gala des petits belly will be held at a distance, on Thursday 18. Animation by actress Karine Vanasse. Objective: $ 150,000.
Goal: to build a tissue bank that research physicians will study to better target the treatments provided to children who suffer from bowel and stomach ailments.
It’s stupid, it’s a bit complex, but the granting agencies that fund research will fund the researchers… but not the creation of an intestinal tissue bank to do the said research.
Hence the Gala des petits belly.
I told you: this is not a sexy column topic. Hey, Columnist, are you really chronicling a “tissue bank” for us?
Answer: yes.
And we are not talking about the tissues found at Fabricville, we are talking about intestinal samples. We are talking about entering the next phase of modern medicine: targeted treatments, adapted to each individual. For that, research is needed.
We are talking about ensuring that children aged 8, 9 or 10 no longer have to undergo two, three or four treatments – over months and years – before finding the right one. One day, we can match genetic markers with the right treatment, right away. And the mountains of suffering will be smaller.
The DD Groleau carries this tissue bank project at arm’s length with his colleague, the DD Kelly Grzywacz. For that, we have to organize this Gala des petits belly. So, in addition to treating their little patients, the two doctors are organizing the logistics of the gala these days: book a caterer, a comedian, filming video clips, refining the texts with Karine Vanasse, contacting journalists …
All the doctors on the unit take part in the logistics. They all believe in this project.
The DD Groleau received me at Sainte-Justine on Tuesday. I met her colleague the DD Grzywacz, as well as their colleagues Faure, Alvarez and Deslandres, who explained to me what they plan to do with this tissue bank, who explained a lot to me about the microbiome and the microbiota, about these diseases of the intestines that killed my mother and marked my childhood …
I will come back to this one day.
It’s fascinating, the microbiome.
* * *
Here is. It’s not a sexy cause, kids doubled over due to inflammatory bowel disease. But suffering is suffering.
The Gala des petits belly is a week away. It is in distancing. To raise funds, we sell tickets and hold an auction. They sell boxed lunches, too. And you watch Karine Vanasse host this evening, for a great cause.
End of my pitch of sale.
Personally, I bought two tickets. One for me, of course.
And one for you, Mom.
Visit the website of the Gala des petits belly