Shadow

Since the tongue surgery, my tongue does not go high enough to completely touch the top part of my mouth, the palate.
So my prothdontist made me a "a palate drop". It fits snugly against my palate but having been made from a mold where I pushed my tongue up flush with it, when I put the palate drop in, now there is closure between the tongue and top of mouth.
It's not an obdurator or anything to do with my jaw or openings in my palate just the very limited motion of my tongue after being reconstructed with a free flap. The hope was that it would actually let me propel the food hard enough to swallow.
and it has worked for lots of his patients. But then none of them had radiation twice so they did not have as much damage to their swallowing muscles.
the palate drop does signficantly improve my intelligibility in that I can form the sounds clearer and louder.

I too was very very leary of clogging my tube or the difficulty of getting down regular food, so much so that I suffered through that dangling tube for almost two years because the doctors had convinced me that the tiny 12FR anti reflux valve in the "button" would clog, while the tube has no valve so it was 16FR
(FR is the measurement of the diameter of the tube, the larger the number the bigger the inside of the tube is)
Yet it has never clogged and I am talking full meals here;
for example tonight: chicken breasts, carrots, broccoli, onions, mushrooms, a cup of yogurt, chopped banana, someleft over soup, all thrown into the vitamix, at setting 10 for 2 minutes. Then I use a strainer just to be sure and pour it into a bowl and syringe it in. It would probably be better for your wife's stomach to use a gravity bag, just hold the strainer over the bag and fill it up. It took a little while for my wife to get the water ratio right - and you do have to add two cups of water. But nary a clog or problem.
I have never heard of anyone preferring forumla over a blenderized diet. I'm thinking of going full time but right now just doing dinner is easier.

Last, as Christine noted, the rate of the food or formula going down the tube matters a great deal. Many many of the blenderized diet people use only a pump at slow speeds. Even the gravity bag is too fast for them, let alone the bolus syringe. It took me a year to work up to the fastest way possible, filling the syringe and depressing the plunger to send it flying, rather than the "bolus".letting it drip down the syringe without using the plunger.

Check out the Oley foundation website or the blenderized diet groups if you need more convincing
Charm