After four years of my daughter not sleeping through the night — four long years of all versions of cry-it-out, of hours-long bedtime routines of rocking and singing, four years of rearranging nap and snack times and white noise and crib-side slideshows, of my husband and me losing our already fragile minds — our pediatrician suggested that we have a specialist examine her airway.
“If her tonsils were any smaller,” the ENT told us, “they’d be classified as ‘enormous.’”
So, what did that mean?
“She’s likely not sleeping well because she can’t breathe,” he explained. “She probably has sleep apnea.”
And what did he propose to do about these tonsils? “Take them out!”
I froze.
I had been ill as a child. I became sick when I was 12. We were on a family trip to New York City to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square. I stood out on the Statue of Liberty’s crown, sipping the (extravagantly priced) hot chocolate my parents bought me to combat the cold, gazing in awe at the dazzling metropolis, the horizon of endless possibility, and was suddenly overcome with nausea. That night, I began vomiting, ran to the toilet, and developed a high fever. I couldn’t even make it to the window to see the ball drop.
The acute illness abated, but my symptoms never completely resolved. Bloating, constipation, and bleeding became worse. Over the next three years, I spent much of my time in doctor’s offices and bathrooms, in pain. I went for X-rays, scopes, breath tests, physical exams; I tried medications, carbon supplements, acupuncture. Steroids worked miraculously at first, then not at all. Experimental drugs went through me undigested. It appeared I had severe ulcerative colitis. At age 15, I had my entire colon removed; the surgeon constructed a pouch out of my small intestine. Since then, I’ve lived a mostly pain-free life, and have been fortunate to have had hectic careers, hectic relationships, and hectic, but very precious, children. One of whom might now be sick, and, as the doctor had just told me, might need her organ removed.
Take them out? Cut open my four-year-old child? How could I allow someone to irrevocably mar her soft, perfect porcelain flesh? I couldn’t.
“If you want, we can do a sleep study to confirm,” he said. “But—”
“Yes, of course I want to confirm,” I barked. “I’m not having you slice her open for nothing! A million things could go wrong.”
Besides, I knew the reason she couldn’t sleep. It was because of anxiety. I’m anxious. She and I come from a long line of anxious and terrorized people; intergenerational trauma is real. This was psychological! Indeed, despite many different theories about the causes of bowel disease, ranging from the environment to our microbiome’s balance, I was still convinced that stress was a culprit.
I saw my husband and the ENT look at each other and roll their eyes. Crazy mother.
“The sleep study is complicated,” the doctor began. “It’s unpleasant and will take more time—”
“I’m not having you slice her open without proof.” I grabbed our coats and headed for the door.
Outside, I was shaking. As we walked home, I realized two things.
One: I am my dad.
For the first time, I understood his visceral reaction to having someone chop up their child. I understood how horrified and terrified he must have been as he watched me lose more and more blood. I understood that he was never against me, but entirely for me.
Two: My emotional overreaction showed me how scared I was of medical intervention. Despite a handful of medical emergencies over the years, I had been living a fairly healthy existence. But the suggestion that something might actually be wrong — and with my very own baby — was unbearable. I was petrified.
This fear remains.
And why wouldn’t it? I once drank hot chocolate at a popular tourist attraction, and suddenly I almost died. I once had sex to make life and instead had an ectopic pregnancy, likely due to my scar tissue from the colectomy, and suddenly I almost died. I once did yoga and ate rice noodles and developed an excruciatingly painful bowel obstruction, and suddenly I almost died. These were all surprise twists (in one case, literal surprise yoga twists). None of these things were in any way anticipated. All of them could happen again.
And what if, worst of the worst, these things happened to one of the people I loved most in the universe?
In that case, they did not. The sleep study was brutal, and indeed showed that my daughter had severe sleep apnea. (And I felt terrible having to put her through the exam.) Her surgery went well, and shaving her tonsils and adenoids helped her sleep. (That said, she’s now a teenager and still, in all these years, has never fallen asleep without a struggle, which I am still sure is due to her psychological lineage.)
But, in another case, the worst did happen. Years later, my mother was feeling sick and feverish. At the ER, we found out that her bowel had perforated and stool had leaked into her abdominal cavity. Once that was miraculously cleaned up and her acute condition was on the mend, we were told this perforation likely occurred because of a cancerous growth in the bowel.
Cancer…
I remembered how, 32 years earlier, as my own bowel condition had gotten worse, a doctor had whispered to my father, “It could turn into toxic megacolon”; I’d overheard this and joked to myself that this sounded like a Transformer. But now I also recalled how the doctor had gone on to say, “It will very likely turn into cancer.” This whisper had found a permanent home in my ear. Cancer . . .
“Bowel cancer in people in their 70s often progresses slowly,” we were told.
Nine weeks later, Mom was dead.
My mother had a stomachache, and suddenly she died.
Breathe.
Will this cancer — this very cancer that I had feared — get me too?
And what about the other people I love, the people who share my genes?
My ectopic pregnancy had implanted only a few millimeters off. Millimeters. That’s how close I was to death, and that’s how close it began to feel all the time.
Adapted from THE GIRL’S GUIDE TO GUTS by Chloe Melas and Judy Batalion. Copyright © 2026 by Chloe Melas and Judith Batalion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
