A little over a year ago Henry vomited at his oldest brother’s fifth birthday party. No big deal; he was our third kid and we’d cleaned up enough gallons of puke not to be fazed. I’d been feeding him blueberries so there were maybe fifteen or twenty recognizable blueberries in there. Did I feed him too many? Had I done something wrong? He was eleven months old at the time. Was I being a lazy parent and had I just let him keep eating them because it kept him quiet? Those questions ran through my mind but if he’d puked them all up it didn’t really matter. He was our third; I’m pretty sure I let him eat chorizo before he was nine months old. It’s not like your first kid where you bug out over every little thing that goes into their mouth. Want some chorizo? Go nuts little man. Chorizo’s good, why wouldn’t you want some? I’m glad I gave it to him too because he hasn’t eaten anything via his mouth for a year now. Now he’s fed through a tube in his stomach. Some shit called Pediasure Peptide. One nurse I know hates it because it smells the same when kids vomit it up as it does fresh out of the bottle. And kids on chemo vomit a lot. So she feels like she’s feeding kids vomit.

After Henry vomited that first time at his brother’s birthday party, we cleaned it up and kept on partying. The next day he vomited a couple more times so my wife called a nurse who said to bring him into Accidents and Emergency. She wanted to make sure he didn’t get dehydrated. For some reason at the A and E they got the idea he might have a urinary tract infection. Since he couldn’t really keep fluids down very well, they asked me to feed him five mils of some electrolyte juice through a syringe every 5 minutes and hold a little cup next to his penis to catch any urine he might produce so they could see if it was in fact a UTI. That was actually fun, holding a cup under his adorable little eleven-month old penis and nursing him little squirts of juice every five minutes. It was sort of meditative and we just stared at each other the whole time. I couldn’t look at my phone or watch Finding Nemo on the A and E TV, lest I miss a drop of that precious pee he was resisting giving me. He finally made a little pee and I gave it to them and we left with some antibiotics, with the understanding they’d call us and tell us if a UTI was the culprit.

He continued to vomit, but it tapered off a bit and it seemed like he was at least taking in more calories then he’d bring back up onto the floor from time to time. Still though we were concerned so we brought him to our local general practitioner. A doctor examined him and while we were there, Henry vomited all over the floor. I was glad he vomited in front of the doctor. I wanted to point at the vomit on the floor and say, “See asshole? That’s vomit alright. Now what are you going to do about it?” What he did was give us an appointment to see a gastroenterologist. That made sense to me, since up to that point in my life, vomit-related issues generally centered in the stomach.

The vomiting plateaued a bit and we decided to keep the plans we’d had to visit the United States for the Easter holiday. Henry turned one. Then the vomiting intensified. While visiting my mom in Massachusetts we took Henry to an American hospital. For a five-hundred-dollar deposit, they did an ultrasound on his kidneys to see if they were infected. They didn’t seem to be. They put him on different antibiotics. We returned to London and started to get scared. Henry was losing weight. Every time he vomited I would freak out. I would feed him so gently, so slowly, and assume I’d done something wrong when he vomited. Why, if I’d been able to feed Henry’s ravenous, feral older brothers, couldn’t I feed him? I would imagine collecting the vomit somehow and pouring it back into him with a funnel. My baby was getting smaller, and that is a fucked up thing to see. The total amount he weighed was less than the amount of weight I should lose. Henry didn’t have any weight to lose! His vomit became the most precious substance in the world to me and I would often start crying whenever he threw up. I would try not to cry in front of his older brothers and fail and they’d ask why, and I would say it was because I was scared.

The gastroenterologist prescribed a drug that’s supposed to make you not puke. He puked anyway. By this point we knew we were going to get some kind of bad news, we just prayed it would be celiac disease or a twist in his gut that could be surgically fixed or something.

Then my friend Brian, whose kids are older than ours, recommended we go see their family pediatrician. He said he’d helped them solve a medical mystery with their son a few years ago and what the hell, it was worth a shot.

Like every other appointment, I took Henry to Dr. Anson myself. My wife is a magnificent mom and is insane about our children and would have happily taken Henry but for whatever reason I’d taken him to the first appointment so we just kind of stuck with that and he became my little project. My wife stayed with our older boys who were five and three and were, frankly, usually the more difficult job posting.

Dr. Anson called Henry and I into his office. He was pleasant and probably in his late sixties. He checked out Henry and was as alarmed as anyone to see the loose skin on his inner thighs.

He asked some routine questions but then he asked one that stuck out from the others: “Is his vomiting effortless?”

“Effortless.”

“Yes, does he retch, or seem distressed when he vomits? Or does it just come up and out?”

“Hmm, huh, um, it is effortless, yeah. He’s not troubled at all.”

“Okay, I think we should schedule an MRI. Of his head.”

“Okay, why?”

“Just to make sure there’s nothing in there that shouldn’t be. Pressing on his emetic center, making him vomit.”

“What, like a tumor?”

He paused.

“I’m glad you said it.”