Fail

That was the result of Liam's swallow study done yesterday afternoon. I'm so frustrated with this result. He actually had a 50/50 swallow where half the time he swallowed fine and the other half he failed because he gagged on it bringing the barium back up into his mouth and tried to reswallow it but opened up his epiglottis enough to allow a bit of the food to get stuck there and then slide done his esophagus.

I'm upset because Liam used to be an entirely oral eater. And now he can't eat much by mouth at all. How do we fix that? How do you get better at swallowing than by practicing swallowing? How do we keep him from gagging? Does he just need more therapy? And if so, where do we fit that in to our already loaded schedule where medicaid is maxed to it's allowable limits?

I put in a call to his therapist who used to work on feedings with him. I'm hoping she has some good ideas of where to go from here.