Welcome to the Club, Specialist!

It's official.  I have an extremely lazy child!  We went to get Bella's Barium Swallow test done today and it was a definite success!  The whole idea was to see if she was aspirating when she drank her formula.  Good news is she is not!  However, she does have weak tongue muscles.  Because of this, she has a harder time eating formula efficently.  I can't say that I'm unhappy about this because if there is a problem, then there is a solution.  The solution in this case is a speech pathologist.  I had to laugh when the X-ray tech suggested going to ECI, because Bella is already with ECI.  All I had to do is give my handler at ECI a call and tell her I wanted to use a speech pathologist.  No extra cost.  No need for a referral.

Hopefully, this particular expert will be able to help us with exercises to get her strength up in her mouth.  That way, eating won't take an hour and she'll eat more at a time!  It seems to me that the doctors think that this should be fairly easy to fix, especially since we are tackling the issue quite early.  Who knows?  This could have also impacted her speech at some point if we didn't do anything about it.  It probably wouldn't be anything major, but we don't need to worry about it now (assuming this therapy works)!

I am amazed at the amount of assistance I've been given for my child.  At this rate, we are going to be seeing doctors or specialists at least once a week, every week, for quite some time.  I think that if we go a month without seeing someone in one of those categories, I would have a panic attack!  For now, I'll just take all the advice I'm given and use the resources that are made available to me.  And maybe, with the next baby, I'll know so much about baby ailments that I will only need my pediatrician.  Not that I don't like our specialists, I'm just thinking that, at this rate, I'm probably going to be a specialist, too :)!