OGDENSBURG – Being able to eat whatever we want is something
that most people take for
granted, but for one Lisbon man, eating is something he’ll
never take for granted again.
This past winter Bruce Wood realized he was having
difficulty eating. Following a brief stay at
St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, it was determined that
his epiglottis was not working properly.
“There’s what they called a ‘flipper’ (epiglottis) in there
(throat) and it was staying open, so food was going directly into my lungs,” he
said, explaining that during his three-day hospital stay this past January his
only source of nourishment came from an IV drip.
“I couldn’t drink or eat anything until they got me a tube,”
he said. “My pills were crushed up with a little apple sauce, but that was it.
No water, no nothing.”
After having a feeding tube put in, Mr. Wood would spend the
next 17 weeks with the tube receiving nourishment through canned “food” sent to
them by the hospital.
“They sent it to us by the case,” his wife Phyllis said,
noting Mr. Wood was fed seven cans each day.
When asked to describe the mixture he was fed once every two
hours when awake, Mr. Wood replied, “It was keeping me alive, but that’s about
it.”
After returning home, Mr. Wood went through three months of
therapy with United Helpers Speech Pathologist Andrew S. Hockenbery, who said
the cause of Mr. Wood’s condition was never really determined.
“We’re not sure why it manifested the way it did, but he had
no swallow function whatsoever,” Mr. Hockenbery said. “He couldn’t eat or drink
anything, as he couldn’t move those muscles at all.”
Mr. Hockenbery said therapy began with simple exercises
designed to increase strength in the muscles needed to eat and swallow.
“One of the exercises involved picking up a piece of paper
with a straw,” he said. As therapy progressed and Mr. Wood regained strength,
therapy then transitioned to ways to make eating safer and easier.
“The last third of the therapy was working with him to make
eating easier and safer for him. I would actually have him bring his breakfast
with him,” Mr. Hockenbery said, adding Mr. Wood can now eat or drink whatever
he likes.
“It was a process. We worked at it for three months,” Mr.
Hockenbery said. “It sounds easy, but it isn’t. It’s no different than physical
therapy. People forget there are all those muscles involved in swallowing.”
Mr. Wood agreed that the therapy wasn’t easy and said Mr.
Hockenbery helped provide him with the motivation he needed to complete his
therapy and begin eating normal foods again.
“Andrew felt like he was coming on a little strong, but I
needed it. I did everything he asked me to and I think he appreciated that I
was working at it,” Mr. Wood said. “You have to be willing to do the work. You
can’t just show up on therapy days. I did it seven days per week and was doing
my exercises at home. You have to want to do it and I wanted to get eating
again.”
When asked what his first meal was after his feeding tube
was removed, Mr. Wood said it was a cheeseburger from McDonalds.
“I was going to have breakfast at the hospital, but they
were in between breakfast and lunch, so I went to McDonalds and was going to
have an Egg McMuffin, but it was too late, so I had a cheeseburger,” he said.
“A couple of days later I had a steak.”
Mrs. Woods added her husband’s diet wasn’t the only that
suffered.
“I was dying for a sub, but I wasn’t going to eat something
like that in front of him,” she said, adding with a laugh that she would
occasionally “sneak something.”
Mr. Hockenbery said that while swallow therapy is commonly
used with stroke victims, he feels like it is an underutilized area of therapy.
“I think there are a lot of people who could benefit from
this who may not even know it exists,” he said.
Bruce Wood
