Last time I was here, I had a little trouble with the final swallow. The first one was ok \u2014 watery barium liquid. The second one was ok \u2014 something more like milk. The third one was, too \u2014 barium pudding with a spoon \u2014 although it did take a little work. But I couldn\u2019t get down the last mouthful of pudding mixed with crushed saltines. The x-ray video of me-the-skeleton showed the problem. There I was, my skeleton jaw moving up and down and my skeleton tongue (?) and skeleton throat trying and trying to swallow. But there it was, that lump of pudding-and-cracker stuck at the base of my tongue in the back of my throat going nowhere.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what happens when the shoot radiation at your throat day after day, week after week, after cutting out a chunk of your tongue.<\/p>\n
But this time, three months after their gun fired its last shot at me, things were different. The first liquidy swallow went fine. So did the second milky swallow. And the spoonful of pudding. And finally the pudding-y crackers. As I chewed and swallowed, I could see the x-ray video in a reflection in the window, and I could see the dark lumps slip cleanly down my throat each time.<\/p>\n
The technician was almost giddy.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou did great!\u201d she said. And she called me over to her monitor to show me the video close up.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people still can\u2019t do that,\u201d she said. \u201cLook at you. Right there. It goes right down. Let\u2019s watch it again. You\u2019re doing great!”<\/p>\n
As an additional bonus: I\u00a0actually\u00a0tasted<\/em> the saltines!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last time I was here, I had a little trouble with the final swallow. The first one was ok \u2014 watery barium liquid. The second one was ok \u2014 something more like milk. The third one was, too \u2014 barium pudding with a spoon \u2014 although it did take a little work. But I couldn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3886"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3892,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions\/3892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}