Amesbury girl happy to share her secret to help others

Jim Sullivan, The Daily News of Newburyport, Mass.
·2 min read

Feb. 12—AMESBURY — Sophie Himmel, 11, has lived with a secret all of her life but she wants people to know more about her feeding tube.

Sophie is the youngest of triplets and only weighed 1 pound, 4 ounces when she was born.

Sophie was put on a ventilator for the first two months of her life. She then had a temporary feeding tube placed when 4 days old and eventually received a permanent one at 4 months old.

"All three of our kids were born at 30 weeks," said Sophie's mother, Erin Hutchinson-Himmel. "Sophie had a lot of oral aversion for the first few years of her life so we could not put anything in her mouth."

Hutchinson-Himmel admitted that Sophie's condition was stressful for the family in the beginning but eventually things began to work out.

"It has never been an issue for her. In some ways, it is her secret power," Hutchinson-Himmel said. "She doesn't have to take nasty-tasting medicine by mouth. If she doesn't want to eat, she doesn't have to worry about it. I don't have to chide her to eat. If she really doesn't want to eat that day, I can just feed her. If she needs to eat and talk and do three other things at once, she can."

This is international Feeding Tube Awareness Week, and Sophie and her family wanted to let the world know that having a feeding tube has just been a fact of life for her.

"I don't really know any different," Sophie said. "It'll eventually be weird when I get it out."

Sophie's elementary school teachers and family have read a children's book about feeding tubes and her classmates used a doll to become more familiar with the situation.

"We wanted to normalize it so we talked about it quite a bit," Hutchinson-Himmel said. "As Sophie got older, she had been with almost all of the kids so she didn't really need to tell anyone else about it. So we didn't do any training when she got to middle school."