The inability to easily swallow anything has led to a rough start in life for little Mitchell Brooks, son of Norman and Lisa Brooks of Robbinston.
     "He spit up more than average, and he was colicky a bit," Lisa Brooks recalls of her youngest child, who was born on February 7, 2011.
     Lisa had lots of experience caring for little boys. Mitchell has three older brothers, 13-year-old Kyle Sansoucie, 9-year-old Wesley Brooks and 7-year-old Sam Brooks.
     "He started vomiting severely C out of the ordinary C so we took him to the Machias hospital, and Dr. Wakeman thought he might have diabetes, and we should go to Bangor and get an ultrasound."
     Norman and Lisa learned that their infant son had pyloric stenosis, a condition that slows or stops the movement of food from the stomach to small intestine. "It had caused his stomach muscles to completely close tight," explains Lisa. "Dr. Careskey told us he sees 10 to 15 cases like that a year, and it was the most he'd ever seen."
     Mitchell had lost one pound and his stomach was completely empty, so he was put on an IV. "He stayed at Eastern Maine Medical Center an extra day to make sure that he could take a bottle, and I was trying to breastfeed," remembers his mother.
     When the little boy was seven months old, he came down with a case of thrush, which causes mouth sores. "We couldn't get rid of it," recalls Lisa. "I was breastfeeding and passing it back and forth, so we were both using a medicine that was not doing the job."
     They wound up in the Calais Regional Hospital emergency room, where Dr. Cressy Brazier suggested to the family that Mitchell needed to go to Boston Children's Hospital for treatment. Fortunately, Lisa's sister-in-law had picked up the anti-fungal drug Gentian violet in St. Stephen. "It numbed his mouth so he could eat," she recalls. "He gulped down everything he could drink."
     But Mitchell could only continue to drink comfortably for a short while and about six weeks later had to be admitted to the Down East Community Hospital for "failure to thrive."
     "He was in Machias for four nights, and then he was taken by ambulance to the Boston Children's Hospital. He was there for nine days, and they gave him every test going," says Lisa. Noonan's syndrome is responsible for development delay growth problems, and "they thought he has that because he has a hard time swallowing for no reason. It's quite rare, and the tests for that don't always work. In 65 percent of the cases, the patients test negative even though they have it."
     If things weren't already going well in little Mitchell's short life, he swallowed a penny one morning when he was 18 months old. "He vomits a lot anyway, but you could tell by the look in his eye that he had something in his throat," recalls Lisa. He was rushed to the Calais hospital, where an X-ray revealed a coin was causing the problem. "They didn't want to touch it. They thought it would dislodge and jump into his trachea, so he went on a lifeflight to Bangor. They put him under at the hospital and pulled out a penny. There was instant relief and a complete change in him," she says of her son. "He had swallowed the penny at 8:30 a.m., and it wasn't removed until 4:30 p.m. I just held him, and he cried and we were able to come home that night."
     In April of last year, an allergic reaction to the antibiotics used to treat an ear infection caused Mitchell to lose two pounds. He was so severely dehydrated that he went to the hospital three times for an IV for fluids. "That was a rough one," recalls his mother. "He was so weak from vomiting and diarrhea that we called his father to come home. He turned around from Indiana."
     In June of 2013, Mitchell had to have surgery at Maine Medical Center to correct an eye problem that is associated with Noonan's syndrome. "His eyes went all over the place, so they cut two muscles on the corner of his eyes and it's better," reports Lisa. "But he needs glasses."
     Because he continued having a hard time swallowing, Mitchell received a feeding tube on July 2, 2013, and then had to have a second surgical procedure called a Nissen fundoplication to block the acid caused by his severe gastro-intestinal reflex. "We had been told that it could be done lapriscopically, but his scar tissue was too severe and they couldn't finish it," recalls his mother. "He spent three days in the hospital in a lot of pain. He needed morphine in the epidural."
     Although Mitchell was recently retested for Noonan's syndrome and will need more eye surgery soon, his mother is happy to report that he is up to 27 lbs.
     A rehabilitative worker for MAS Home Care of Maine's Children's Services visits the little boy three times a week for speech therapy, and her supervisor also makes regular calls to the Brooks' residence. "He doesn't receive physical therapy, but he's going to need the feeding tube for awhile," she adds. "He's not close to being able to swallow yet."
     However, in many ways, Mitchell is a normal little boy. He is attending the St. Croix Head Start day care in Calais four days a week, and he is friends with 3-year-old Catherine and 2-year-old Lois, whom he calls "Wowis." And his mother reports he is obsessed with buses. "If we're in the car and drive by a bus, he just freaks out. We have bus toys and he loves the song, 'The Wheels on the Bus.' That makes him happy."