Barium! I hardly know um

Tell me this doesn’t look like a school science project! 

One of the symptoms on the list for Immune-Mediated Necrotizing Myopathy is difficulty swallowing — as the muscles used in swallowing get weaker along with everything else.

On Sunday I met with Amanda the speech pathologist, who stopped by with a smorgasbord of kindergarten snack-time treats to test my ability to swallow. She had me eat/drink crushed ice, then liquids of various viscosity (water, apple juice, thickened apple juice, pudding, canned pears, building up to the more challenging graham crackers) while she watched and took notes. 

Then yesterday I went to her lab to do the same thing (except the items on the tray were ALL barium) — while being recorded by a kind of video X-ray. Imagine, if you will, a grocery store taste test where everything tastes like liquid chalk, except the pièce de résistance, the graham cracker, which gets dipped in the chalk pudding. 

But then! On to the procedure with the best name yet: THE ESOPHAGRAM. I stood on a little step attached to a big metal vertical table, facing the table, pressing my belly into it, and the table inverted (WOOHOO!), bringing me horizontal and then a little beyond horizontal so that my head was angled toward the floor. Then a straw was put to my lips so I could swallow some more barium as the X-rays recorded so they could observe my esophagus in action. When you’re upside down, if your esophagus is in good shape, you should be able to swallow something and the muscles in the esophagus act like a little elevator to take the food “up” to your stomach. 

I’ll meet with Amanda tomorrow to talk about what they found.

Not sure exactly what this shows, other than parts of myself I’ve never seen before! (The floating dots are the buttons on my hospital gown.)

“Now if someone could just bring me a barium milkshake, my day would be complete”