A Miracle for Matisse

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A Miracle for Matisse

28.06.2006

LINDY ANDREWS "If Matisse doesn't have this surgery, we'll just have more of the same with no end in sight." The prognosis from Hawke's Bay Hospital paediatrician Dr Corban could not be more clear. Unless some way can be found to fund a small intestine and liver transplant for five-year-old Matisse Reid, the Napier girl will be intravenously fed and in pain for the rest of her days. Her condition is so rare, Dr Corban knows of only one other case in New Zealand. But it gets worse. There are signs that Matisse's liver is beginning to protest and her little body is running out of veins big and strong enough to take the cannula (tube) through which she is fed.

"The liver can develop hepatitis and cirrhosis," Dr Corban says.

"It gets scarred through her food and nutrients. "No chemical preparation can perfectly match a natural diet." It's important to note that the type of hepatitis Matisse stands to develop is not infectious. Put simply, it's a form of inflammation caused when nutrients are pumped directly into the bloodstream, instead of being first processed by the digestive system. But it can be painful, causes dreadful nausea and affects the body's ability to process fats essential to growing children. Likewise, her major veins, whose walls have been made fragile by the lack of a normal diet, aren't up to the strain of a lifetime of intravenous feeding and Matisse is running out of sites where a line can be inserted. "Technically, it's becoming more and more difficult," Dr Corban says. "Every time something happens to a line it is a major concern for us." And things do happen. Sites become blocked or infected, develop blood clots and inflammation and get damaged. Lines can also work their way out of the body as their young host grows. So far, Matisse has been lucky. Her Wellington surgeon, Pringle, has worked miracles. Matisse's condition, idiopathic pseudo-intestinal obstruction, has defied everything in the pharmacological artillery. Anti-spasmodics should stop her intestine's erratic and agonising spasms, but don't. Morphine should ease her pain, but doesn't. Small wonder Dr Corban describes her little patient as "my most challenging case I've ever had to manage." Except that, to this professional, Matisse is not just another case. Corban prefers straight talk but when asked whether she loses sleep when Matisse is having a bad time, she reluctantly admits Matisse is often the first person she thinks about when she wakes in the morning. Her deeply caring streak comes to the fore again and again. She knows Matisse's likes and dislikes - that she loves Barney the Dinosaur, swimming, dancing and the colour purple. And she has nothing but admiration for Jodee and Wayne Reid, Matisse's parents, who, under Pringle's orders, don surgical gowns to shoulder tremendous responsibilities normally restricted to medical staff. "If she didn't have them as parents, she'd spend every night in hospital being fed. They are the only ones we want to handle her lines," Dr Corban said. "She's such a delightful little girl when she's well. "You just wish that's what her whole life would be like."

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