'Diagnosis': 17-year-old girl cannot keep any food or fluids down after being bitten by raccoon on a trip to Costa Rica
A new seven-part series on Netflix titled 'Diagnosis' looks at rare and unusual medical cases in the hope of finding a diagnosis for the patient. The show is based on a 'New York Times' column by Yale School of Medicine physician and author Dr. Lisa Sanders who assists patients in finding an answer.
Episode 5 of the show looks at the case of 17-year-old Lashay Hamblin who is unable to keep down anything she eats or drinks. She has suffered from the strange condition for two years and has not received any sort of diagnosis as to what the condition could be. Lashay Hamblin who hails from South Jordan, Utah was a happy and bubbly high school student like any other until a family vacation to Costa Rica in 2015 changed her life completely.
Lashay, her sister Madison, and her parents Jodelle and Jeff had gone to the Manuel Antonio National Park on the second day of their holiday when they had an encounter with a raccoon. The raccoon ran towards Lashay and grabbed onto the foot which resulted in the skin breaking. Around two days after the encounter, Lashay began to experience vomiting, headaches, and stomach and neck pain. She was told to go to the emergency room where she was given shots for rabies which just made the entire problem worse.
"After I eat, I don't know why but it turns my stomach in a way where I just can't handle it. Ever since this has started, I haven't kept fluids down," Lashay shares. Ever since Costa Rica, Lashay is unable to keep down any foods or fluids. She was given a chest port that is directly connected to her heart and allows her IV drips. This method is not very safe and puts Lashay at a high risk of contracting an infection. Lashay was also left feeling helpless after doctors told her that she was doing this to herself. With the help of Dr. Lisa Sanders, crowdsourcing led to around 2,600 people writing in to help diagnose the condition.
The answers ranged from things like Addison's disease to some saying it was psychological. The three main diagnoses given to Lashay were POTS, Rumination Syndrome, and parasitic infections. So far, all the tests for POTS and parasites have shown up as negative. As Lashay shares in the episode, "It’s just hard because every doctor has their diagnoses and we’ve been told that I have been diagnosed with a lot."
The Hamblin family are not very trusting of the medical community given a couple of their past experiences with doctors, making the diagnosis that much harder. Lashay's mother Jodelle, is also reluctant to trust doctors after being told by many that her daughter's condition was psychological with none of their proposed treatments giving results.
By the end of the episode, Dr. Sanders comes to the conclusion that Lashay could be suffering from Rumination Syndrome which is a condition where people repeatedly and involuntarily regurgitate undigested or half-digested food from the stomach. The exact cause of the syndrome is not known. Dr. Sanders also suggests that Lashay could be treated at the Nationwide Children's’ Hospital in Columbus, Ohio which has an in-depth program on treating Rumination Syndrome. However, at the end of the episode, it was revealed that Lashay had not sought treatment for Rumination as her sister Madison revealed on Twitter that their "insurance wasn’t going to cover going out there and it was going to cost over 30,000."