EA/TEF Awareness Month begins each year as soon as the ball drops at Times Square. Different Dream is celebrating awareness month by featuring stories written by parents who are raising kids born with EA/TEF. Some are raising children who are still quite young. Others are parenting teens. Some, like me, have adult children who are out on their own.

Because Different Dream is a blog for parents raising kids with a variety of disabilities and special needs, not all of our readers are familiar with EA/TEF. If that’s the case for you, here’s a quick summary.

EA/TEF is short for esophageal atresia with or without tracheoesophageal fistula. No wonder it goes by its initials, right? EA/TEF is a congenital anomaly in which the esophagus is not a completely open tube. It has a number of several different types which are described and illustrated at this EA/TEF link. The condition is fatal unless newborns receive immediate treatment which requires surgery and a NICU stay. Each child’s recovery is unique, as this month’s guest blog posts will show.

Different Dream devotes all of January to raising awareness for a very simple reason. My son, born in 1982, was an adult before I met another EA/TEF parent. We lived in a very remote area of the United States for the first three years of his life, which is a partial explanation for our isolation. We moved to Iowa in 1985, but it took 2 decades and a connection with someone at our church for me to meet that first EA/TEF parent face to face. It still happens so rarely that reading the paragraph below (from an advertisement for a local pediatric clinic) got me really excited.

My hope is that when new EA/TEF parents search the internet, they’ll find this website and be encouraged by the stories shared here. I also hope that whether or not your child lives with EA/TEF, these stories will encourage you, too.

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Photo by nine koepfer on Unsplash