The Barium Ingestion Club

Several weeks ago, I got to do an upper-gastrointestinal-and-small-bowel X-ray. While I can’t say that it was “enjoyable,” it was interesting from a scientific point of view — my being, you know, a chemistry teacher and all. Seeing pictures of your insides is both macabre and fascinating, and it was nice to be told by the technicians (two of them, separately) that the curlicue pattern of my small bowel is “unique to me.”

The worst part of the whole process, aside from the slimy and gelatinous barium sulfate emulsion I had to drink, was the waiting. The technician would take a picture every thirty minutes, and my job was to help speed the barium through by walking up and down the twenty feet of hallway in the middle of the building. I had taken my crossword puzzle along, but I’m not very good at those, so it didn’t relieve the boredom very much.

Now, since infants aren’t allowed in the exam room with their moms (and really, I can understand why), Todd stayed at home with Simon that morning. And while Todd is an excellent father and I knew Simon was probably enjoying the change of pace, it was frustrating not to get any cell phone reception as I was pacing the halls. I wanted to call every ten minutes to report things like “barium sulfate: disgusting!” “I just got 39-across!” and so on. I lamented about this to the technician between pictures, and she sent me out onto the balcony in my hospital gown. It felt weird, but I was desperate for news from home and a friendly voice, so I did it. She asked me lots of kind questions about my baby and was generally very nice about it.

After about two and a half hours, they did the upper-GI exam, which involved drinking Pop Rocks (or a very close equivalent) and more barium. I must have looked like I was going to kill someone about the barium because the technician tried to calm me down. “It’s not as bad as the other stuff! It’s thinner!” I must have looked dubious. “You know who really likes this stuff?” she continued. “Babies! It’s because we don’t let them eat for several hours before they have to drink it, so they just suck it right down.”

All I could think of right then was what a terrible thing that was to mention, not because this is true, which I discovered later, but because the idea of withholding food from your baby only to feed him something completely non-nutritive seemed, well, repulsive. And I had just gotten done telling her how much I missed my baby. Fortunately, the whole experience was over shortly thereafter, and I got to go home and everything turned out fine.

Then a few weeks later, Simon decided he didn’t want to finish bottles anymore. His intake dropped precipitously, and he lost a little weight, which concerned us and the good folks who see him at Doernbecher. There was no obvious reason for him to not want to eat. We went in for a feeding evaluation, and he totally lost it in front of the feeding specialist, screaming and squirming. It was the opposite of taking your car in to the shop. So, the specialist suggested we do a barium swallow study to make sure no food was getting in his airway.

Of course, this involved waiting several hours for Simon to get hungry again, which we spent in the Starbucks at the base of the elevators (for reasons I won’t go into, don’t buy items from the pastry case at the Doernbecher Starbucks). When it was time for our appointment, he was very very ready to eat, and we set him up in the X-ray video machine. I was handed a bottle of the familiar-looking goo and told to go for it. So, feeling kind of deceptive and mean the whole time, I fed my baby an inorganic salt emulsion while the radiologist videotaped his head. And amazingly, Simon didn’t mind. In fact, he
kind of liked it, which makes me question his judgment about food, and which I will remember when he is a toddler or teenager refusing something delicious at our dinner table: “You can’t talk about not liking that. You don’t know anything, you like barium sulfate!”

The X-ray video itself was pretty amazing. They played it back for me later, and I could even see the food dripping down his chin. Next up: Todd? Want to join the Barium Ingestion Club?

Just to tie up narrative loose ends, although this is not the point of the story, we’ve made some adjustments to his feeding routine, the most notable of which is an increase in his antacid medication, which has done wonders for his intake and attitude about eating.