Growing up in Tennessee, Haston could eat. Fried chicken, pizza, whatever she wanted. Cheese quesadillas were her favorite.

She started getting sick in 1994. Food wouldn't stay down. At first she thought it might be stress, or something in her diet.

Later, she learned that the stomach, like the heart, is just a muscle whose flexings are controlled by electrical impulses. And her stomach's electrical activity wasn't right. Food that reached it would back up and be expelled.

Her family moved to Pennsylvania in 1995. She had her first cardiac arrest the following year. It was discovered she had a heart ailment, too, and could not take some medications that helped others who had gastroparesis.

She had to rely on tube feedings and intravenous nourishment. She got depressed. Even being near food made her sick.

Her attitude changed dramatically in a faith-inspired moment in 1997.

Haston was singing during a worship service at Messiah and began to cry.

"I realized I had wasted the last three years of my life, and that I had been bitter and angry at God, and everybody who could eat and wasn't sick," she said.

She found new determination. It led her to form an Internet support group, and later the nonprofit.

Kenneth L. Koch, Haston's physician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, said gastroparesis should be better appreciated by doctors and the public.

He praised the G-PACT Web site, www.g-pact.org, calling it a unique blend of personal support and solid medical knowledge.

Koch said, "She has put together a first-rate service for people who have her problems, while overcoming very debilitating conditions that would have put most people flat on their backs."

Veronica Pennington of Bellefontaine, Ohio, the mother of a toddler, was helped by Haston's Web site.

Her son, Nicholas, is 21/2. She said he laughs, cries, plays a lot, and "if you didn't see his tubes you would never know he is sick."

She has found that most people think gastroparesis is in the sufferer's head. But G-PACT is going to change that, said Pennington, who is vice president of the organization.

"G-PACT is going to be an everyday term. Just like breast cancer. When you say that, everyone knows what you are talking about." 

FORD TURNER: 255-8486 or fturner@pnco.com
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