Just to clarify: Hirschsprung's disease actually occurs when a portion of the myenteric nerve plexus either fails to form or regresses during fetal development, so that part of the rectum and often colon is tonically contracted, and cannot relax to allow stool to pass through. The babies have the appearance of being partially or completely obstructed and the healthy colon above that area dilates to compensate. The gold standard of diagnosis is a rectal biopsy, which will show absence of the nerves. Hopefully, this has been done or is in the works. There are many options available for surgery, including a multi-stage procedure where the baby is given a colostomy, the colon is allowed to rest and the baby to grow, and a completion pull-through procedure is done later. Commonly now, this will be done as a one-step procedure, and can be done laparoscopically and even "incision-less" where the surgery is essentially done transrectally. I had the pleasure of doing research under Dr. Jacob Langer while he was at St. Louis Children's Hospital (he's now Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.) Our initial Hirschsprung's study got entangled in red tape, but I did a lot of background research. He is an excellent resource for HD info. Importantly, HD is linked with a number of congenital abnormalities like Down's Syndrome. Though this should probably have been obvious, keep those things in mind when thinking about breastfeeding difficulties. Shannon McElearney, MD Research Fellow, PGY4, Dept. of General Surgery University of Virginia who once upon a time wanted to be a pediatric surgeon until she had her own lovely 16-month old nursling and realized as much as she loved it, she couldn't handle the long hours away from him for the rest of her life... *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html