ENT Visit

Ashleigh had an appointment with an Ear Nose & Throat specialist. Her doctor wanted the ENT to do a videoscope of her throat just to make sure there were no problems with her vocal cords that could be preventing her from speaking more.

Our visit to the ENT was actually the second trip in the last few weeks. The first visit the doctor took the history and said come back later for the videscope. Very frustrating since we thought we were there then for the scope.

They squeezed us in with an 8 AM appointment for the videoscope. That meant my wife and I got up about 5 AM to start getting ready. I am not an early riser. Then of course when we got to the doctor’s office, the doctor who was going to do the procedure wasn’t even there yet.

After the procedure which is fairly quick and no too difficult for Ashleigh we went back to the other doctor’s treatment room for him to read the results. He said that there does not seem to be any problems or any areas where Botox injections would help.

The doctor basically said that Ashleigh’s vocal cords seem to be working fine as her recordings show. The bump that is visible in the pictures below is a cyst but he said not to worry about it. He said it could make her voice a little raspy but given all of the other issues we should just continue to watch it over the next few months.

Ashleigh has not been able to speak since her brain injury. See the post below “Ashleigh’s Voice” to hear Ashleigh speak.

He did say one thing that drove my wife nuts. He said when Ashleigh talks to just encourage her. I took that as the doctor really not having much to say and was just kind of saying something to wrap things up. My wife took it more literally like the doctor really thought he was giving us some new direction. Did he think that when she started talking for a few minutes after not talking for six years that we were not trying to encourage her? That was why we were in his office in the first place trying to learn if there was anything else we could do to get her talk more.

We joked that here, after six years of no voicing, that without the doctor’s wonderful insight we would have kept telling Ashleigh to keep quiet every time she tried to talk.