Update from a couple of weeks down the line. The second visit with the speech pathologist got me a reference to someone who does acupuncture for saliva which he believes would help (but, with an abundance of caution, he suggested I check with my ENT first) and he gave me some encouragement that I was doing the two swallowing exercises he gave me more or less right but I have still been very forgetful about actually DOING them a couple of times a day since then (I'm getting better).

I am still doing at least one bowl of soup or something else every day(today it's liquidy mashed potatoes with sour cream, turkey gravy and lots of extra butter--about as thick as I can do).

Meanwhile, my ENT, who I'll see for a regular follow-up this Tuesday, got the results of my barium swallow and apparently wanted to do a FEEST test on my swallowing to get a better look at what the problme might be. I remember someone else here said they had one of these. If you happen to be reading this, could you let me know what that involves? I haven't talked to the ENT directly, I was called by his assistant about this to see if I wanted to do it (I said sure--anything that could help).

What's mainly getting in my way lately (and in the way of everything else I want to do during the day) is I'm in week 5 of the breast radiation and fatigue has hit me in a really major way--hit at about week 3 and has just gotten worse. I wake up after 9-10 hours of sleep (although I can't sleep straight through because my dry mouth gets painful and wakes me every 2-3 hours) and I'm as tired as when I went to bed. I have to take a couple of 2 hour naps on top of that during the day in order to have any energy at all when I am up and even then there's just like this wall of tiredness I run into which makes me forget all sorts of important things like making myself swallow more......

MY RO warned me that this would probably be the case, especially since this is the second rad treatment I've had in 6 months. It's funny because he kind of gave me a lecture when I asked about fatigue as a symptom when we were discussing the oral rad about how no one knows if fatigue is a "real" symptom of radiation or is just a result of stress and a cumulative effect of other things such as chemo. But then this time around he told me I could probably count on feeling fatigued by the second rad treatment so I guess he does think it's a real symptom after all. Anyway, it sure feels real to me right now. Before it hit, this rad treatment was a total piece of cake and even with the fatigue its worlds better than the oral cancer rad with chemo and amifostine on top!

But I'll still be glad when it's over and I get SOME energy back.......

Nelie