2.5 Year old with dysphagia helped by a caring knowledgeable SLP

We asked people to share the impact on them and their families as part of the upcoming National Dysphagia Awareness Month. Submitted on 4/12/16…

My daughter has been struggling with dysphagia and is neurotypical. She is now 2.5 years old and thanks to her brilliant speech pathologist we have made amazing progress although we are still struggling with solids. Due to the dysphagia and a serious of gastro issues by daughter was severely delayed with her intro to solids. She couldn’t even digest them until age 16 months. As you can imagine, this has created a long list of problems with feeding.

Today she still has dysphagia and if I had a penny for how many people ask me why does she still have that I would be rich. First of all, its an insulting question because it implies I or her have done something wrong to still be struggling with it. Second, its an ignorant question because we obviously do not know. More stunning is the fact that many of her doctors ask me the same question because she is neurotypical. I think swallowing disorders definitely need more awareness because if we hadn’t fallen into the lap for such a great speech pathologist we would be struggling upstream against a lot of doctors without much respect for dysphagia.