Good News/Bad News

Welp, after minimal progress with speech therapy since September, the therapist and the pediatrician were grasping at straws, and so they sent J for a barium study this Monday to evaluate the anatomy of his throat. He has a very weak swallow, and the thinking was that maybe it was being caused by some sort of defect in his esophagus, etc.

The test itself was a breeze, and Jonas thought it was great fun to see what he named "bone-jonas" on the tv screen in front of him. All it consisted of was him taking a few bites of foods in varying consistencies which were laced with barium to show up on a moving x-ray. I'm no expert, but from what I could see on the screen, everything worked perfectly.

It was no surprise to me when the pediatrician called today to let me know that the test results were fabulous, and my kid does not have any physical defect preventing him from swallowing/causing him to gag/making him drool.

So, the next set of options are to continue in speech therapy and see if improvement is just slow to happen, referral to neurology to make sure that my kid isn't suffering from some neurological defect, or drugs.

Don't get me wrong... I'm in no way interested in finding out that my son has some sort of defect or problem, but wandering around without a label and grasping at staws as far as treatments go is starting to get depressing and costly.

For now we've chosen to continue in therapy and see where it goes. If there's no change in two or three months, then we'll consider the neurologist, and as a last resort, medications, which don't really solve anything, they just dry up the saliva, and that concerns me for a lot of reasons. I mean, spit's kind of important in things like digestion and oral health. Not to mention, imagine the feeling of walking around with cotton-mouth all the time.

Bleh...