Gulp

One of Emily's resolutions for last year was to chew. She managed to pull that off pretty successfully, but she still struggles a bit when handling food in her mouth. My dad and brother have both had some major troubles with swallowing. I eat really slowly, although I don't attribute that to any trouble with swallowing.

Anyway, all that together with Emily's remarkable drool-powers led us to be a little bit concerned that she might have some sort of swallowing disorder. I mentioned that concern to the pediatrician during a visit for something else, hoping that the pediatrician could give me some additional information or opinion. Instead, she set up an appointment for us to go through a swallowing study at the hospital. The swallowing study, we were informed, involves a radiologist and a speech pathologist feeding the child and monitoring the results. Already, this sounded significantly disproportionate to my level of concern, but for some reason we still went through with it.

I was pretty worried about my little girl before we went in. She couldn't eat the morning before her study, but that didn't seem to bother her.

The children's hospital is really well setup for handling kids. Right after I snapped this shot, I noticed the orange sign saying, "Please do not allow children to lie on the CT scanner." Oops.

They gave her a hospital gown and then strapped her into Captain Picard's command console. They mixed up some barium with water and chocolate pudding and then dipped a graham cracker in the pudding. Emily ate all of them like a champion while the radiologist and speech pathologist watched a live x-ray of her throat. We waited for about an hour. The study took about 5 minutes. The pathologist said that Emily doesn't have any problems with swallowing, but probably has low sensitivity in her mouth so she can't tell when it's full of saliva and sometimes gags on her food.

Emily was remarkably well-behaved. We gave her a princess plate and cup as a reward for how good she was. We couldn't leave without taking a moment to play with the ball-machine of doom. This thing's pretty cool. There's not much one can do to interact with it, but Emily still felt like she was in complete control. We're glad nothing's wrong with her swallowing. I hope we didn't cause too much damage while irradiating her head.