Dysphagia is just a fancy way of saying "Oh crap!"

After all the stress was over with the Medicaid trial and the California tenant mess subsided everyone except David came down with a nasty cold that is still lingering on. Because we wouldn't want to actually enjoy the relative peace and calm. And I say relative because we're still under the influence of 3 mostly unreasonable little people, one of whom continually keeps us on our toes. Usually just when things seem to settle down with Sam he finds new ways to remind us that we can never let our guard down.

Last week Sam had an appointment for an upper GI and a modified barium swallow study. What these tests look for is not as important as what they found. First of all, Sam did awesome! That kid continues to amaze me. One of the things he had to do was drink some nasty, chalky liquid on command from a straw while lying on his back. Even I would have a hard time doing that but Sam did great. Anyway, they immediately saw that Sam refluxes (food and stomach acid come back up into his esophagus). We knew this but have never actually seen it on xray. The unfortunate thing is that Sam is already on the highest dose of reflux meds. The other finding is that Sam aspirates liquids (some liquid goes down his airway). This puts him at risk of pneumonia. Sam has had this test before as an infant and no aspiration was found so this was new to us. Fortunately, Sam has never had pneumonia.

We go back to the doctor soon for a follow-up and will hopefully get some better ideas for these issues. Right now we've altered his reflux med schedule a bit so he gets two smaller doses instead of one big one and we're thickening all of his liquids so they go down the right hole. The most convenient and least nasty thickening agent out there is very pricey and would cost us over $100 per month. A friend of mine suggested I try making my own thickening formula (other than using baby rice cereal which makes the liquid chunky and frothy - yuck! and can contribute to Sam's constipation issues). At first I thought, "yeah right like I have time to figure that out." But I was compelled to google and immediately found a recipe for that pricey gold standard of thickening agents. The main ingredient is xanthan gum which, turns out, is sold at Whole Foods for a fraction of the cost of the thickener itself.

So today's project is thickening agent production. Yay.