Hello, I'm mom, Sarah Ring, and this gofundme would help my daughter Gracie Ring (5 years old) with housing, food, amenities, and gas during our lengthy stay in Atlanta, GA.

Gracie was diagnosed with an eating disorder known as ARFID, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. Basically, in easy terms, she is afraid to eat food. We do not know the cause, but what we do know is her anxieties towards food has gotten drastically worse over the past year.

We noticed early on that Gracie was very small. She was never on the growth charts and was termed FTT, or failure to thrive, and also malnourished. We went through testing and fighting doctors as to why this was happening and couldn't put our finger on it. Around December 2019, January 2020 we finally saw the extent of how hard it was for Gracie to eat. She got most of her nutrients from milk and even was not interested in that. Her weight was dropping lower every week, she had no energy and even started not walking anymore. We officially were scared and our GI specialist at Vanderbilt clinics agreed we needed to start to fix this. She was hospitalized for a week in February where they decided a feeding tube would help us. She had an upper endoscopy which showed body wise she has no abnormalities that would make eating hard or hurt. During that, they put in her NG tube.

After finally gaining some weight and starting nutrition appointments weekly, therapy appointments for her anxiety, and also SOS feeding therapy, they all said something was off. It wasn't a texture issue or a dominance/independence issue and she WOULD starve herself and not eat. Our SOS therapist said "I cannot help anymore, this is not in my wheel house, and i think she has an anxiety towards food which is not something we can fix here." This was the first step to really figuring out what was wrong.

After neuropsych doctors, and psychiatrists, and OT along with her pediatrician and all therapists working together we have decided to enter Gracie in a specialized eating disorder clinic that is multidynamic. This decision is severely hard for us because she is 5 years old and we would be in a different state from sister and Dad. But we understand helping her with her eating anxieties at the start and not waiting for them to get worse. Because of COVID-19 most places are not taking families that are not currently hospitalized for ICU related issues. We found a rental place about 15-20 minutes from the hospital. Any amount will help and if you can't help monetarily, just sharing our link will help more than you know.