Daya’s Mystery: What Was Causing a Young Girl's Internal Bleeding?

Experts From Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s Search for Answer and a Cure

The Dhillon family seemed to be living the California dream, enjoying the waterway just steps from their home on Naples Island. But a little more than five years ago, when their daughter, Daya, began feeling ill, the Dhillon family’s California dream morphed into a medical nightmare.

Daya was around 7 years old when she started feeling tired and lethargic. Her mother, Diljit, said Daya’s tiredness would come and go, but it was so extreme, they sought medical help.

“We started our medical journey with blood work and found she was very low on hemoglobin, and that was our first indication that she was losing blood,” Dhillon said.

Over the course of the next few years, Daya underwent four colonoscopies and endoscopies, swallowed pill cameras and had numerous imaging scans as doctors tried to find the source of the internal bleeding.

As Daya’s condition worsened, she became too tired to go to school or engage in any of her favorite water sports. And one day, her parents found her unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the nearest hospital emergency room.

Physicians were stumped, and with no other likely diagnosis, they suggested putting Daya on steroids on the chance it could be Crohn’s disease. But the Dhillons weren’t ready to give up.

“It didn’t feel right to treat her based on a default diagnosis,” Daya’s father, Avtar, said. “With all the testing that was done, we still didn't know where the bleeding was coming from and why it was coming.”

That’s when they came to Cedars-Sinai and to pediatric gastroenterologist Shervin Rabizadeh, MD, MBA, chair of Pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai and associate director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s. After a thorough exam, Rabizadeh recommended one more endoscopy with Quin Liu, MD, a unique specialist within Guerin Children’s who does advanced endoscopies for children.

“We were told Dr. Liu is able to scope into places and see things that others can’t,” Diljit Dhillon said. “We were willing to give it one more try.”
Liu and Rabizadeh suspected a Meckel’s diverticulum, the most common congenital defect of the gastrointestinal track. Essentially an abnormal outpouching of the small intestine, Meckel’s diverticulum affects up to 3% of the general population and represents a common cause of bleeding in children.

“From all the previous tests and scans, it appears doctors were looking for a Meckel’s but didn’t find it, in part because of its location,” Liu said.

One of the reasons a Meckel’s was suspected was that Daya was losing so much blood that she needed transfusions, a hallmark of the condition. The difficulty was in finding the source of the bleeding.

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