Saving Gentrie: Teen survives tough battle against disease that paralyzed her stomach

Whatever happened to Gentrie Hansen, the girl who couldn't eat?

I still get asked this question occasionally, 10 months after the original story appeared, whether it's on the street or via email.

When are you going to write an update on Gentrie?

Today, and thanks for asking.

Maybe you're among those who recall Gentrie's story last summer. She's the girl who lives across the street from me who contracted gastroparesis — paralysis of the stomach. Her stomach just stopped working in December of 2009 when she was 14, perhaps because a virus attacked the nerves. No one knows. She couldn't eat or drink anything because her stomach instantly rejected it. She was vomiting constantly, even when she didn't eat. It was like having a permanent case of flu. She had to be fed through tubes leading directly into her lower intestine, bypassing her stomach. Her weight plummeted from 112 pounds to 78.

Here she was, surrounded by restaurants and grocery stores and a kitchen stocked with food, and she was starving. Imagine feeling hungry for a year and not being able to eat anything. It was torture watching others eat. The family put up a "kitchen closed" sign in the kitchen and ate secretly, in closets or in the basement, so Gentrie wouldn't have to watch. She knew what was going on. She knew what was really happening when one of her brothers would say to another brother, "Come down in the basement; I want to show you something."

Once, her loyal, heroic big sister, Kenzie, who was by her side night and day throughout much of the ordeal, came up with a plan. They raided a hospital vending machine of all its junk food so Gentrie could chew and spit, just to taste food again.

So what happened to Gentrie? There were four months in one hospital and three months in another hospital and that doesn't even consider the ER visits, which are too many to count. There were botched surgeries and surgeries to fix the botched surgeries. There was a neighborhood fast. There was a mysterious fainting spell in which she smacked her head on a marble counter on her way to the floor. By the time they found her she wasn't breathing and no one knew how long she had gone without oxygen. She couldn't walk or talk for weeks, and she is still trying to recover basic skills and big gaps in her memory. "They think Gentrie's dead," Gentrie's distraught father Lowell told his wife on the phone as paramedics worked.

It was every parent's nightmare.