Video Swallow Study Results

As usual, my child never follows a typical path, or anything remotely resembling it. It would appear that he has a mission in life to write his own page of history or something. :)

Anyway, fortunately, the test today showed exactly what was happening. Unfortunately, at this time, we do not have a reason why or how we can help him. For now though, documenting what is going on is a relief to me. Someone else got to see what was going on and clearly - very clearly - there was a big problem.

Will started the test by eating some pudding mixed with barium and then the radiologist watched it go down. It is a neat test to watch, if it isn't your own child struggling to eat, that is. If I understood correctly, Will had some difficulty with initially letting the food go down, but then his esophagus did open and allow the food to pass. Then, about halfway down his esophagus (somewhere in the mid range), it bounced back up rather quickly. On the outside, we could hear him swallowing a ton and gurgling to get it down. We stopped feeding him, and eventually, it did pass all the way down.

Thin liquids (juice) were better - straight shot down, but they did come back up from all the way down in his belly (reflux - but worse than it has ever been in his life, so again, strange).

No compression of the esophagus was seen, no narrowing.

Basically, the chief radiologist was clearly baffled. Equally as baffling is that Will has had this test performed before - numerous times. Last time was 1 1/2 to 2 years ago and it was totally normal. He's going to compare the scans. He was also very amazed that Will was not aspirating given the amount of food/liquid in his mouth that he was trying to get down. (and Will was doing a fair amount of gurgling) It did go all the way to the vocal cords, but no aspiration was seen. (Again, his previous swallow studies, nothing went to the vocal cords - was normal.)

For now, we wait for a phone call from GI for the next step, which presumably is most likely manometry testing. The radiologist thought this is where we were headed next, as did we.