Barbara continues to get a little better each day although her feeding tube seems to be bothering her a little more than it was. The nausea is still there and gets worse at times, but is better than it was. Her mouth sores are also still present, but they do not seem to be too bad since she is eating more and more. We have not used the tube for a few days except to give her some medicine through it since taking pills will sometimes bother her (makes her want to throw up), especially just before going to bed at night. We are making sure to flush it at least once a day as well. She does struggle to take in enough calories in a day although yesterday she was able to take in about a normal amount as we had several high calorie meals and she started eating her smoothies again as well. If she continues to eat enough over the next week or two, we should get the tube out soon.
The biggest problem still seems to be that food will sometimes get stuck going down. It can happen when she forgets and swallows too much at once, but also seems to happen at other times. We are hoping this will improve as she eats more. We are wondering if there may be a little narrowing of her intestines, esophagus or where there are now connected, possibly from some scar tissue from healing. We hope whatever it is will stretch out on its own with her eating more, but we will have to see. I believe that if it gets worse of shows no improvement, they might be able to go in with the endoscope and stretch it out. When she is very careful, there is usually no problem, but it is easy to forget and just swallow a little too much or eat just a little too fast or eat too much during one sitting. This is clearly going to be a bit of a struggle for a long time, but as she learns more about how to eat now, we hope it will slowly get better.
Wayne
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