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January is EA/TEF Awareness Month. If you have no idea what EA/TEF is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t have a clue it existed until 11:00 AM (Mountain Time) on May 23, 1982.

I was impeccably dressed in a fetching hospital gown when a nurse wheeled me from my room to the nurses’ station to take a phone call. Back in the olden days, cell phones hadn’t been invented yet, and small hospitals like the one where our son was born didn’t run landlines into patient rooms.

I would mention that the term landline hadn’t been invented yet either, but that would detract from EA/TEF awareness, so I won’t mention it.

The pediatrician on the other end of the phone line explained that our baby, who’d been transferred to a larger regional hospital for tests, had a tracheoesophageal fistula, TE fistula for short. His esophagus, the doctor explained, came down from his throat and formed a blind pouch. It came up from his stomach and hooked into his trachea.

That was what doctors called it in the olden days. These days, they call it EA/TEF. Esophageal Atresia (EA) for the pouch at the top and tracheoesophageal fistula (TEF) for the hook into the trachea at the bottom.

Our son had surgery the day he was born. 5 years and 6 surgeries later, our boy could eat normally. But several decades passed before my husband and I met other parents of babies born with the same condition, or with one of its variations. We didn’t meet them or learn other EA/TEF variations existed until we joined Facebook.

Because the internet and Facebook weren’t invented until our son was an adult either. Boy, do I feel old.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve become friends with young parents who know more about EA/TEF than I ever will. One mom, who’s writing a guest post for EA/TEF Awareness Month at www.DifferentDream.com, recently sent this update about the progress of her article.

The rest of this post can be found at Not Alone’s website for parents of children with special needs.

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