National Network for Equitable Library Service

A Gut Reaction is an entertaining as well as informative true story about the author’s battle to save her son’s life — or at least his large intestine — from a very severe case of Crohn’s disease. With persistence, humour, much searching of the Internet and the help of two unusual doctors, one in Canada and the other in Australia, she and her son, who was in his early twenties, finally find a regime of fecal infusions that replaces the bacteria that had ulcerated his gut with a healthy flora donated by his mother. The manuscript details their adventures and then concludes with a helpful summary of how they did it. It includes a foreword by Dr. Thomas Borody, a globally recognized gastroenterologist and the Director of the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Australia, whose emails and phone conversations helped the author understand what, how, and why to do what was necessary. When the regime is only a partial success, she figures out on her own that she must eliminate many of the problems that are preventing the helpful bacteria from being able to colonize her son’s intestine. By talking to a helpful pharmacist and then with the support of a helpful doctor she begins the healing of the intestine walls and develops a more extensive regime of fecal infusions that cures her son. Sky Curtis’s sometimes desperate, often hilarious, and always determined international quest for a treatment for her son’s life-threatening Crohn’s disease resulted in a new protocol for the treatment of this disease.