For the last couple of weeks we've been pureeing food for Glenna to eat. (It's amazing how well salmon crabs, barbecue ribs, and anything crunchy is able to be pureed.) However, Glenna will be getting more of her daily nourishment from Ensure. This all part of the natural progression with ALS where people are unable to chew food (in particular, chew crunchy tid-bits of food) and thus, they have to drink something silky smooth for nourishment to go down.
Glenna was outfitted with a feeding tube earlier this year. She mainly uses the feeding tube to ingest medicine. At some point, all her food will probably be ingested through the feeding tube. For now, we are transitioning to drinking Ensure.
Talking-wise, Glenna's speech has been reduced to garbled utterances. She's been using a low-tech Fisher Price Doodle Pro to write out specific words. That simple childhood toy has worked great. Now, Glenna is upgrading and learning to use a high-tech DynaVox device (shown below) to communicate what she wants to say.
This DynaVox device is basically a laptop enabled with a digitized speech generator. Glenna can press a touch-screen button for common sayings like, “Please move my feet.” and the DynaVox will voice that exact sentence. She can also use the device in more complicated ways to talk. But really, this high-tech device will come in handy when Glenna plays Dominoes with her friends and needs to say, “Use this to start my train." (To view the screen, click here.)
Every day brings new problems and we experiment to find new solutions. Bottles of Ensure, the Doodle Pro, and the DynaVox speech generating device are helping to solve for Glenna's difficulties with eating and speaking.
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