A Positive Test

Finally! Yesterday I finally had a test that showed that something is going on! After struggling for a few weeks with choking on my food, feeling as though I have a lump in my throat, and needing to clear my throat for up to an hour after eating, I went in for a swallow study. I've seen many of them done, but they've always been on babies. I joked that I assumed I wouldn't be fed a bottle, but wasn't completely sure what I was in for! After describing my symptoms, we started the test. They turned the screen so that I could watch the x-ray video as I chewed and swallowed foods of different consistencies. Initially, everything looked very normal. Then they stopped the test and had me eat a bag of animal crackers. We re-started, and pretty quickly I heard them say, "There it is!" Even I could tell something was different. I was swallowing multiple times to get one bite of food down, and still felt as though I couldn't swallow effectively. And now I could see it on the screen. We wrapped up the study and the speech therapist came out to talk to me. "You can see right here, you have what we call 'coating'--you're not getting all of the food down when you swallow as the muscles get more tired. I could see you swallowing over and over. You can feel it, can't you? We're limited by time and what we can give you here, so we only gave you the animal crackers. You have some mild abnormalities on the second part of the study. If we'd been able to feed you a full meal, I think it's safe to say we would have seen more. The good news is, you're not aspirating any of it. I don't think we need to make any huge changes. But I do think you should start eating several small meals a day, rather than three large meals."

I can't say how relieved and excited I was to have something tangible to validate what I'd been feeling! In my worst moments, I was afraid we would start the test and they'd say, "Whoa, whoa! Stop! You're aspirating everything--let's send you home with a feeding tube." Or I was afraid it would show nothing at all. To have something conclusive but not dangerous was amazing. And I'll take any excuse to snack throughout the day, thank you...