Traveling Boy’s Memory Lane Invites all writers to share their stories to the world. As long as websites in the internet are accessible, these stories will be your footprint of your life adventures. They may be happy, sad, playful, religious, political, narrative, poetic, etc. The more creative and the more honest, the better. Years … centuries from now, some alien ship will find this website and will wonder what mankind was all about. Your articles will answer a lot of their questions.
By guest writer: Mel Sturr
My oldest daughter Jasmine has been dealing with significant health issues since she was a teenager. Up to that time, she was the model of good health – she rarely had more than a cold as a child. That all changed one day, when in her freshman English class she felt a pain in her left foot. We took her to urgent care that evening and they just gave us some Tylenol and said if it continued to make an appointment with her doctor. The pain traveled up her leg and within a few days it started affecting her other leg. We took her to the first of probably hundreds of doctor appointments that have continued to this day. The next few years were probably some of the most difficult, because none of the doctors were able to give us any answers to why her body was progressively getting worse. It’s not easy trying to convince a teenager that we will find a solution when she was losing hope in the medical community. She didn’t feel that the doctors were taking her seriously and that took its toll. It wasn’t until she started college and she was having trouble walking that she got a diagnosis of Juvenile Onset Parkinson’s Disease. It is an extremely rare condition, but with medication she was able to continue her education at the University of Redlands.
She initially found relief from many of her symptoms, but her medical situation got worse. By the end of her third year, she needed deep brain stimulation surgery. That was a game changer in dealing with her Parkinson’s symptoms and she was able to enjoy a fluidity of movement in her everyday life that she thought she had lost forever. It was right around the same time that she started to develop gastroparesis symptoms as a result of the Parkinson’s – essentially, her stomach stopped working.
She needed to go on tube feeding to get enough calories to survive. Her body was not able to absorb the amount of formula that she needed, so her last alternative was to go on IV nutrition. Throughout all of this, she was an amazing student and somehow found the strength to push through her last year of college and was able to graduate with her degree in Chemistry. As she walked across the stage to receive her diploma, I was immensely proud of her but terrified that she was not going to survive.
After college, Jasmine needed to move back home and work on her health. That has been a difficult process filled with ups and downs, but with a new medication she is now thriving on a combination of tube food and regular food that she is able to tolerate. Using her knowledge of chemistry, she set out to solve a problem that her feeding tube was causing – skin break-down around the tube. This is a common problem for people with feeding tubes. Bile leaks from the stomach, causing what is essentially a chemical burn. The pain is constant, and nobody has come up with a solution. To make matters worse, the medical community has not even addressed the problem – mostly, I think, because they don’t believe it is that big a deal. So, Jasmine came up with a powder solution that pulls the moisture from the leakage away from the skin, where it gels together and can easily be wiped away. The result was amazing – no more pain and the skin healed up. It no longer looked red and angry. When I saw what she did, I convinced her that she needed to get this out in the market so others could get relief as well. That started a three-year process of starting a company called Jasmine’s Lab, applying for a patent, realizing that the hurdles of dealing with the FDA were too much for us to handle on our own, finding a manufacturer to license the patent, and finally getting it to market. We introduced the product, Stoma Ease, at an ASPEN conference in Tampa Florida. It was a gathering of healthcare professionals in the field of nutritional support. The response could not have been better. It demonstrated the absolute need for this solution. We created a website and started selling the product online. It is hard to describe the satisfaction of knowing that this will help thousands of patients and improve their quality of life. Now that we have a manufacturing partner, we have created other products. This story is definitely not over yet!
