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When Mackenzie Hild first moved to Boston with her mother, she fell ill and lost an incredible amount of weight. At 5’3”, she barely weighed 75 pounds, but her doctors didn’t believe her when she kept insisting that she did have anorexia.
Hild insisted that her weight loss wasn’t because she didn’t want to eat – she wanted to eat, but eating always triggered intense pain in her stomach, so she simply couldn’t bring herself to eat. “I didn’t know how to convince them this is not in my head,” Hild recalled.
For the next five years, Hild and her mother traveled across the country to see various doctors and specialists, hoping to get a proper diagnosis of Hild’s condition. Many times, these unsuccessful visits left Hild wondering if her condition was simply psychological. “There were times I wasn’t sure myself,” she admitted.
During this time, Hild’s stomach pain was too much to bear. She couldn’t bring herself to eat any food, so she spent five years of her life being fed through a feeding tube that carried food and nutrition up Hilherd’s nose, down her throat, through her stomach, and finally into her small intestine.
The doctors had Hild’s feeding tube deliberately bypass her stomach to avoid triggering the pain that arose whenever she ate any food.
When Hild was a second year at Harvard University, her parents had a serendipitous experience that changed everything.
Hild’s parents ran into a medical professor from the University of California at San Francisco when they were hiking. They mentioned Hild’s case to him, and as someone who focused on rare medical cases, he knew he had to investigate further.
The professor recruited the help of fourth-year medical school student, Jessica Gould, and it actually ended up being Gould’s persistent research that led to Hild’s accurate diagnosis.
Hild was suffering from median arcuate ligament syndrome (MALS), a condition where a band of connective tissue near the diaphragm blocks the supply of blood leading to the stomach and other organs. The symptoms are, as was the case with Hild, the same as those of anorexia, but because MALS is such a rare disease, most doctors don’t consider it.
It didn’t help that one of Hild’s past doctors had inaccurately run a test and determined that there wasn’t a possibility that Hild was suffering from this MALS.
When Gould finally told Hild what she’d discovered, Hild remembered, “My first reaction was complete disbelief. I couldn’t believe so many doctors had missed this. And I was just so happy to have an answer.”
When Hild’s condition was confirmed by Christopher Skelly, chief of vascular surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center, she immediately scheduled her treatment surgery.
The day after the procedure, Hild tested her repaired stomach by eating a bite of the hospital’s scrambled eggs and waited.
No pain came.
Hild has had to re-acclimate her stomach to eating, but since the procedure, she has been able to eat without any pain.
You can hear her talk about her experience here:
