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Family perspective: raising a child with NEC and the need for multidisciplinary care

wjps · 2026-05-29 · canonical JSON source

5 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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The steady pulse of monitors and pumps fills the room while I hear the clinical team assembling out in the hall. This all too familiar scenario briefly takes me back to our days in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where my son spent his first 7 months. Yet on this day, this is the backdrop as we prepare for his third surgery to place a g-tube in the last 7 days. We are here because at 9 years old, he weighs only 38 pounds (17.2 kg), one of many enduring remnants of his battle with necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) as an infant. Surgery to place a g-tube is fairly straightforward, but nothing about his abdomen is straightforward. Even so, three surgeries, fixed-loop bowel obstruction, and nearly 4 weeks in the hospital just for a g-tube far exceeded what we had anticipated.