Silent Aspiration Diagnosis

Since the time Noah was born I had a very difficult time nursing and bottle feeding him.  He would always choke and for the longest time I thought it was me and that I was doing something wrong.  He would arch his back at times or fight me.  It was horrible and I brought it up to about four different doctors who all said that maybe my let down was just really fast and choking him at times.  I knew it was more than this.  I had a gut feeling and I should have been more persistent from the start in figuring it out.

It was the day of our first meeting with Noah's case worker.  He was holding him and listened to his chest.  I then asked him how I could feed him better because he seemed to always choke.  I wasn't going to just whip out my tata's right there to nurse Noah so I opted for a more conservative approach with his bottle.  Seriously, within two sucks Noah started to cough.  The case worker told me to stop and told me to immediately call our pediatrician and order a swallow study.  

Once again I had no clue what any of this meant so I googled it like I do with everything these days.  Noah was seen the next day and it was found that he was silently aspirating every time he was eating.  This means that every time he sucked he would have the liquid pool up by in his esophagus and then his larynx would not close around his trachea and then some of the liquid would go into his lungs.  This is very dangerous and can cause pneumonia.

The outcome was to put a feeding tube in his nose and down to his stomach to bypass the liquid from getting anywhere near his lungs.  Being naive as I was I just thought "if that is what the doctors 'think' I need to do then this is what we 'must' do!"  Right?!?  Wrong!!!!

This whole NG Tube process was miserable for everyone involved.  Poor Noah hated how uncomfortable it was in his nose, taped to his cheek, the rashes it caused on his face, and the tube hanging down the back of his clothes.  We hated how long it would take us to feed him, how we were constantly worried about the tube somehow coming out of his stomach and feeding the liquid directly into his lungs.  How hard it was to go anywhere and have to feed him with a million people watching.  Not only that but Noah had to stop nursing which was really sad for me to not have that bonding time with my baby. The worst part was that it made Noah lose his ability to eat and take anything by mouth other than his pacifier. I am skipping over a ton of details and stories about this whole NgTube experience because it was one we loathed from the first night forward and I would like to forget about it somehow.  We were determined to get that thing out asap!

...and we did within two months :)

The online support group I joined that helped me deal with this whole feeding tube process was Tube Fed Kids Deserve to Eat (http://tubefedkids.ning.com/).