I am appalled to note from my insurance papers that it was May before I took him in to the pediatric practice where he has been going since he was 2 days old. They, of course, looked at his throat with a light and a tongue depressor. Nothing. They took a strep test. Negative. Must be a virus, they said.

Getting Embarrassing

Time passed. Gideon continued to complain at intervals, and at some point I finally caught on that he was actually saying that his throat hurt all the time, not just when he talked about it. Could this possibly have something to do with that long-ago fish bone incident, I wondered.

My reaction to that thought was a harbinger of what I would get from doctors when I finally started talking about it: I was embarrassed even to think something so silly. I could just hear myself saying to a doctor, "My son swallowed a fish bone last November and his throat still hurts." Yeah, right.

In July, on our second visit to the pediatrician, physician Katherine Lischwe told us to take Gideon in to a pediatric ear, nose and throat practice. They'd have equipment to see down farther into Gideon's throat and be able to tell what was going on.

This was excellent advice, and we took it. Unfortunately, our appointment with another otolaryngologist at the same practice where Gideon had been seen the previous fall was simply the first of a very long and very unproductive series of visits to specialists.

The doctor we saw in July, to her credit, asked Gideon where his throat hurt.

When he pointed to the base of his neck, at the hollow of his collarbone, she said, "That's where children point when they have acid reflux." I learned later that she is the "refluxologist" at that practice. And so she put him on Zantac and later Prevacid. Not content with that, she also prescribed a 10-day course of antibiotics, in case Gideon had an infection, and Claritin, in case he had an allergy.

Three drugs. I was very uneasy about this shotgun approach but asked only a few timid questions before agreeing to her plan. After all, she was the authority, wasn't she? There is a second lesson to be learned here: Always speak up about what makes you uncomfortable.

The Doctors' Parade

More weeks passed. Gideon faithfully took his medicine but was no better, (although he really enjoyed taking the antibiotic since it was in the form of chewable cherry-flavored tablets), and a follow-up visit and call to the doctor elicited no further suggestions except that I should "give it time." It seemed clear that she had nothing else to suggest.

In October, Gideon developed a chronic headache to go with what we all persisted in thinking of as his chronic sore throat, even though he had clearly pointed to the base of his neck as the area of pain.

Our visit to our pediatric practice to investigate this additional malady gained us nothing except an additional medical term: "behavioral." The doctor we saw that day said that he thought Gideon was just being "histrionic" and that his symptoms were behavioral.

What did that mean? It meant that Gideon was making the whole thing up. And nothing I could say against such an idea made any difference. There was no help to be gained there.

Time would fail me to describe the parade of doctors that followed:

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