any experience of difficulty swallowing saliva,very noisy,liquid sounds in airways...

[hazeyjane]

ds (nearly 1) has recently had trouble with his chest. He has just been to the hospital and they think it is because he has trouble swallowing (he has delays and low muscle tone - under investigation). He sounds very liquidy in his upper chest and it affects his sleeping, he also drools a lot (tshirt soaks through regularly). The paed said he needed to see a SALT, has anyone got any experience of this and what they can do about it?

Thankyou.

yes my son has a delayed swallow - got better as he got older and a floppy throat - traciobroncalmalcia - again improved with time. His on liquidised food. the drooling you can get patches for - dr should be able to prescribe them but i don't know what age you can get them from

DD had a test done called a video-fluroscopy which looks at the swallowing action. They mix barium into some food that your DC will eat and you feed it to them whilst they are sitting inside a sort of x-ray type frame and the pictures come up and show how the swallowing action is working. It was arranged by SALT and done by Radiographer at hospital.(as SALT was worried about DD aspirating because of poor swallow) My DD doesn't dribble but produces copious amounts of phlegm and sounds permanently rattly in the upper respiratory tract - we have to suction her to clear it. Some of her class mates who dribble wear special patches prescribed by paediatrician though. DD has the head of the bed raised up to aid swallowing whilst asleep. DD is now tube fed (used to eat liquidised food) but this hasn't made any difference to her secretions.

Thankyou for your replies.

I ended up spending a long afternoon, chasing up a SALT referral that was made ages ago, and it turned out that ds was 'lost in the system'! By the end of the day, I had made a referral myself, and managed to get an appointment with a SALT in 2 weeks time. The lady I spoke to on the phone, did think that aspiration could be an issue, and said that they would look at maybe referring for a video-fluoroscopy. She also suggested thickening his milk with Carobel, and trying something called a Kapi-cup (?).

I am so relieved, that things are moving along.

dd2 was born with no gag or swallow and so ng tube fed to start with. her suck and swallow came in very slowly, and she had a lot of trouble with 'thin' liquids and weaning to mixed textures (we found thickening purees helped a lot). we had slt (feeding) support from birth though, which tbh kept me mostly sane for the first couple of years. she's 7 now and still drools a bit (she has athetoid cp but mostly low tone) and dysarthric speech.

she weaned on quavers. we tried the patches but they caused skin irritation - you can get the same meds in liquid form but we didn't bother. her speech was much clearer when she was on the patches, but now she is able to do the 'swallow and use your lips' thing to improve clarity. the slt also suggested she wore sweatbands on her wrists to mop drool when she was aware of it, once she stopped wearing bandanas (she stopped wearing them during yr r - she was a t mainstream and wearing uniform and objected. we just sent dry clothes in for her to change if she was sodden).

later on there is also a surgical option for botox to reduce drooling, or even to reverse the salivary glands in extreme circumstances - but that's a long way off.

i like www.new-vis.com it has a lot of slt/ feeding ideas (click on the 'feed your mind' button. it's written by a sly with a feeding specialisation i think. useful for tube feeders and any parent who has a child with swallowing issues.

good luck with your appointments. fwiw our slt was spectacularly sensible and refused to vfc dd2, because we all knew she had an unsafe swallow. (she had regular chest infections from aspirating. but she was convinced that tube feeding was not the answer for dd2, and was convinced that she could persevere with exercises to improve oral control. at 7yo dd2 eats a mostly normal diet, but we have to watch for boiled sweets and things like raw apple or carrot which have a slightly higher choking risk. (something else you might want to think about if you need statementing later - i insisted that there was someone trained in dealing with choking incidents providing supervision at school for lunch and snack times - so it was written in to her statement)

oh, and she sounded like darth vader until she was 3. still does sometimes. you don't notice it as you get used to it, but i remember interviewing a nanny when she was about 2, and after a short while the prospective nanny said (with a really concerned look on her face) 'does she always make a noise like that?!'