When I was born, doctors gave me 24 hours. No surgeon wanted to do the resection. Finally my parents convinced one young surgeon to do it. My small intestine was resection at least 4 times as they had problems getting the two ends to reattach properly. Spent the first two years off my life on TPN, in and out of the hospital. Rather stressful on my parents. A lot of complications came of it and some new ones crop up from time to time. I have numerous allergies ( milk, nuts, shellfish and a number of fruits and vegetables) these allergies may or may not be related to the surgery. However, because the problem came up shortly after I was born my body has adapted some what. My small intestine is as short as ever, but has become much wider than normal and certain parts have taken up the jobs that the missing parts would have done. Still have problems with certain foods. Fruits and vegetables don't agree with me and usually come back up a day or two after I eat them. Not fun. I avoid them. Diet is quite plain, meat, rice pasta, potatoes, eggs, that sort of thing. Eating out is a problem due to the allergies. But all in all I'm doing pretty well these days. Can't put on weight, I'm 5'11 and 130- 140 lbs. My weight is somewhat hard to nail down as I eat and drink a lot. 5 lbs. at a meal between food and whatever I'm drinking isn't unusual. I take supplements for vitamin K, my body doesn't have the bacteria that produce it and I don't eat the green leafy vegetables that contain it, take calcium supplements as I can't have dairy, get bi monthly B12 injections. I Also have a slight iron deficiency that is almost impossible to get rid of as iron supplements go right through and have some nasty side effects. But all in all if you met me you wouldn't know. I live a fairly normal life and continue to get regular checkups and such. ( approx every 2 months.) Because I have always had this none of this seems out of the ordinary to me. Don't know any different. And I am lucky in that I don't spend any time (lately) in the hospital and can do pretty much what I want excepting dietary restrictions. I know of a few children who had the approx. the same amount of small intestine left and spent years in the hospital and most of them didn't live beyond 10 years of age. One thing to remember would be that any mistakes you make now in keeping track of the side problems (kidney stones for example) will come back to get you later. Oxalate is a type of salt found in a number of foods. With SBS your body gets rid of this salt through your kidneys. It can cause kidney stones and eventually kidney failure. However, to avoid this unpleasant situation I try to limit my intake of those foods (coke, tomatoes, oranges, wine etc) and when I do have some make sure to drink water with them to try and dilute the salt as it goes through my kidneys. In many ways I would say that this has been much harder on my parents than it has been on me. I'm used to it and I don't know any different. They are the ones who had to drive me to the hospital whenever there was a problem, they were the ones who had to drive me to the hospital when I was 12 and had a weird sort of seizure. Woke up one morning, I don't remember anything after being a wake for about half an hour. Apparently I didn't really respond to anything. At the ER my parents sat me in a chair and I sat there staring straight ahead not responding to anything, the surgeon who had done the resection came by, tried to talk to me and I kept staring straight ahead (Lights on No one home). Ended up simply being some sort of salt deficiency. Like I said side effects and problems creep up. I currently live 1500 km away from my parents and am the IT coordinator for a mid-sized insurance brokerage, job works well with my weird hours. I am often up at 3 or 4 for an hour or so to eat. Haven't slept too well in a few years. But my job is fairly flexible as long as things are working properly I can come and go as I please keeping track of my hours. So sometimes thing work out in the end. I have heard from people who don't have nearly problems as I do and some who have many more. But eventually I think you learn to deal with it. And accepting that this is going to effect the rest of your life is an important part of that.