Gut Feeling – A Journey Through a Child’s Digestive System
Gut Feeling is a book, published in collaboration between Nicola Stewart and Evelina London Children’s Hospital. It provides insight for parents and carers of children with digestive disorders.
Nicola Stewart, a parent of a child with medical issues around digestion, has written a book to help other parents of children with similar needs.
You can download the book for free, just click on the yellow box at the end of this article.
“Eating is a basic thing we take for granted, but when you have a child with medical issues around digestion, it can become immensely complex.
I am the parent of Spike who was born four months prematurely. I came from a background of sports massage and had a good grasp of physiology, but I had to learn fast. Medical jargon can be bewildering, particularly when it’s applied to your own child. Add in the anxieties of being a parent of a son or daughter in hospital, and it can be overwhelming.
I wrote ‘Gut Feeling’ to take parents on a journey through the gastrointestinal system and navigate the complexity of medical jargon based on my family’s struggle to understand our son’s illness. From ‘In’, ‘Along’ and ‘Out’ the book follows food from ingestion to excretion. Each chapter explains how different parts of the digestive process work and then talks about what ‘could go wrong’. It describes some of the challenges parents face, the impact these may have on day to day life and ways to help deal with them. There are ‘fun facts to share with your child’ and simplified descriptions of common disorders, procedures and treatments.
All sections are illustrated to help a family’s understanding of the gut and engage a child more positively with what is happening inside them. This is a book I wished I had to help me to cope when we started on our journey. It is not a text book, I wanted it to be more fun, and I wanted to tell it from the perspective of personal experience.” By Nicola Stewart.
Nicola has first-hand experience of trying to understand the complexities of the digestive system to support her own son in his medical journey. She was only too aware of the very limited information available for parents and families, and has created this exceptional resource to support and empower families and improve their experiences of medical care.
Gut Feeling will provide a bridge between children and their families on one side and the health care profession with their complex maze of medical terminology and jargon on the other side – when Nicola promised to write something exceptional she truly delivered.
If you have found this article helpful, you may also want to check out our article on Video guides for parents caring for a child with a gastrostomy.
If you’d like to give your feedback on the book, you can email Nicola at [email protected]
If you have any comments, ideas, or suggestions about this article please contact us at [email protected]
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Kathy Gibson
Digital Information Officer
First published August 2020
Last reviewed July 2023
Next review due July 2024
