Mom is on her way back from MD Anderson. They did their own evaluation of her swallowing problems and has confirmed that she does have a solid stricture. No opening-not even an air bubble. The location of the stricture is next to her voice box. Therefore a reconstruction is even more complicated than originally thought. To do the surgery they would have to remove her voice box. She could have an artifical voice box put in and would need to re-learn how to talk with it. Obviously she is very disapointed. At this time she is feeling she would rather live the rest of her life with a peg than to have her voice box removed for the sake of eating or drinking.

So I am looking to see if anyone here has had an experience similar to this prognosis. Also is there any reason to seek addittional opinions. Obviously MD Anderson is supposed to be one of the best in the world. So is it safe to assume their options are the only valid ones?

MD Anderson also is going to have her feeding tube replaced with one with out tubing and works more like a button. This should make life easier for her. Has anyone else ever had one of these put in?

My final question is......if her local md was on top of this progressive swallowing problem wouldnt' they have been able to do something (besides sending her to a speech therapist) to intervene before the stricture was completely closed? Obviously it did not happen over nite...if they were more proactive couldn't they have done dialations before it got to this point?


Any feed back would be appreciated.
Tami