help my gerd daughter .i'm from CHina

Dr. Paul Taiganides, M.D., is the medical director of the Knox Regional Heartburn Treatment Center at Knox Community Hospital in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Dr. Taiganides and Knox Community Hospital were one of 14 locations selected to participate in the initial US clinical trials for the LINX device. Since then, Dr. Taiganides has performed more LINX procedures than any other U.S. surgeon. The center has done more than 700 Nissen fundoplication surgical procedures in the last seven years. Recently, he has trained surgeons in the LINX technique at Harvard University and Northwestern University.

I feel your pain, dealing with Chinese doctors is not the same as dealing with a foreign doctor. In China the consulting room is often filled up with lots of different people all fighting for the doctors attention, at the same time.

So it often feels that one wasn't given enough attention to even get a proper diagnosis even, so I feel your pain there.

On the other hand I have been suffering with GERD for over 1 year now, so I know this desease can be difficult to cure or get under control.

In my case I've learned that the trigger for my GERD is stress. If it's intense enough or long enough, my GERD comes right back.

In fact I found your post now after a search, because my reflux just came back after having stopped for about 1 month. What triggered it was a lit bit of bad news that I got from my home country, I was told that my mom has a serious desease and will likely have to go though surgery soon.

That was enough to depress me a bit and restart my GERD. Last week has been like hell on earth, with several sleepless nights, some weight loss, and even aspiring some magnesium solution while sleeping.

I had taken a magnesium solution before going to bed to control the acidity of the stomach, this had worked for me before so I tried it again in a desperate attempt of getting a good night of sleep.

To my terror I woke up choking on this magnesium solution a couple hours later. I SAT up on my bed, drunk water to clear my throat and patiently waited for my breathing to normalized. It usually takes around 15min feeling like suffocating before it normalizes. This time, I guess because the magnesium was present on the liquid I aspired, it took longer and I was considering going to a hospital in the middle of the night cause I thought the magnesium woulnd't clear itself off my lungs by itself.

But I eventually started feeling better, around 30min to 1h after waking up from it. It's the day after that now and I'm trying to drink plenty of water to assist my body in forming the mucus to remove that filth from my lungs, today I coughed a bit so I think is a good sign.

But of course with filth getting on your lungs every night, there's some risk of damaging it with the stomach acid, debris, pills you take, or developing an infection aka pneumonia there. So that concerns me, a lot. Specially with this reflux now triggering ashma attacks which I hadn't have since I was little.

Reflux can have several consequences, which are much worse than the reflux itself. It is truly debilitating. Imagine being denied sleep and enough food for long periods of time, it's awful. Now add to it long periods of suffocation feeling, ashma attacks, voice alteration, panic attacks, severe weight loss, difficulty swallowing and you start to get the picture why people freak out over reflux.

So for me and people who have their lives taken away from them by this otherwise aparently mild desease, reflux is a big deal and so I am also now, after 1 year of pure torture, starting to consider surgery.

I have found out about the surgical options and am starting to consider them. I dislike the regular surgery that people get because I've watched it on Youtube and the damage it does inside the belly seems extensive. Stiches all over the place, wrapped stomach, with reduced size, stiches holding it all together etc. As a colateral effect you will never again be able to vomit. Scary.

So I am, like you, Linda, considering the Lynx option. But I am still unable to decide, since I don't know how safe it is. For instance will those metal balls eventually fuse with or in any how damage my esophagus? What's more, will the Lynx device prevent my sphincter of feeling the acid and eventually perhaps fixing itself, makind the GERD a perpetual chronic issue for me? (I still have hope that my body will self heal at some point given that I am a young man with otherwise good health non-drinker non-smoker etc).

I have also read the the Lynx is not recommended for those with a big hiatal hernia. This is very frustrating for me, because I had an endoscopy done in hopes of finding out exactly what was causing my refluxes, then brought the results for my Chinese doctor to see, upon which I asked whether I had a hernia but his answer didn't address that. I insisted and asked again, but he simply said it seemed I don't have one. So after 1 year of suffering I still do not know what the cause of the reflux is. That is, I know it starts by feeling stressed. But there should be a mechanical cause at some point, such as hernial etc, but I am not sure whether I have one or not hence I don't even know whether I would qualify for a Lynx surgery.

This desease seems chronic and for that it's very frustrating. But at least I would like to gain a better understanding of it, but have been unable to learn a lot about it from my doctor. I have read everything I could find on it on the internet. For instance I don't know why my doctor never had me do a pH or a h.pylori test to investigate the cause. Every time I asked about the cause I was told to just be patient and wait it out, it would go away. And it eventually did, only to come back 1 month later.

So I will continue to look for a more permanent solution, possibly surgical. If your daughter and hope she's fully recovered by now, seeing what this desease can do to me it hurts to imagine what it could do a young child. But if she's still suffering from it let's get in touch so we can share some tips with each other.