Commercial? Nah.

Today we had a very brief go round with the world of making money from this blog when I enrolled it in the Google Adsense program that would pay us to have ads in the margins and above the text. Apparently, if you have a fair number of people viewing your site they can make you some money. We figured that we would give it a try and see what happened.

Who really notices the ads on websites anyway?

I hit enroll, loaded the blog and saw what Google chose to fill our ads with: An ad for nutritional supplements and two ads for the competition for Ellie’s Mc-Key g-tube.

Our experiment lasted a total of 45 seconds. If you happened to visit during that time, well you are the lucky winner but you won’t see those ads anymore here. Since we have no control over these ads and realized that we may have some opinions on the ads that pop up, we debated it for about 30 seconds and pulled the plug. Quite honestly we thought that the ads would be seen as some kind of endorsement for the competition when we have never even seen, much less used the other products.

If we are going to talk about products and companies we will do it with full control and without anyone buying our space. We will start making a list of the companies and products that we use with Ellie and will discuss them in hopes of helping other parents make good decisions about how to best help their kids with short gut. We have used a bunch of products and a couple of providers for Ellie’s supplies and we will share this with others who are in the trenches and need all the help that they can get.

One great example of a product that we love is Ellie’s enteral (feeding) pump called a Zevex Infinity. A tiny little pump that is so small that it can fit with her formula into her tiny little backpack. This is the first bit of advice that another mother of a child with feeding issues gave us in our first room at Children’s before we accepted that she would be in the hospital long enough to need a private room. She told us to make sure that Ellie got a Zevex because there is nothing like it and it will change her life. She was right on both fronts- there really isn’t anything like it since the next size pump is more than twice the size and also it has changed her life allowing her to be mobile and even learn to walk and run with the backpack on without any ill effects.

We have also been told that some companies, both insurance and home providers, are hesitant to provide the Zevex for little kids, preferring the bulky competition. Our advice is to fight for this one.

There is no substitute. Except, maybe Pump-Free:

One interesting exception to all of this advertising is that Abby has started working for NutriThrive , one of our supply companies this winter so our comments about them may be seen as more than pure commentary on the company. All I can say to this is that we were very happy customers before she ever knew of a possible job and that we pull no punches to get Ellie what she needs.