Radiation and throat cancer

Hi Alan and welcome to our community

Do you mean a long time after treatment? There are one or two of us who have to have oesophageal dilatation to enable swallowing after severe radiation fibrosis. 
chris2012 I know can swallow only thin liquids and is on a permanent PEG. seeker1 too
I’ll do a search for you and see if there is anything else. 

Have a look here community.macmillan.org.uk/.../dilatation-of-the-esophagus

If you put Dilatation into the search function at the top of this page you can look through some posts on this very subject.

Hi Alan

welcome to our small community group.
have you completed treatment yet ? During treatment I had a feeding tube fitted at week 3 I had it in for 6 weeks jn total.  It’s not uncommon for feeding tubes during treatment vDani has given you a link if it’s post treatment   
Hazel x

Yes I have had endless endoscopys to dilate it. I am now given a long tube to put in daily which should keep it open. I also had continuous bleeding from my throat to my stomach for quite a long time. The doctor says it did not come from the radiation although it happened afterwards. It took nearly twenty endoscopys to cure it and many blood transfusions because of the amount of blood I was losing. I am happy to say that my doctor did manage to cure it in the end. Today I rarely see blood like on the tube I put in. I think it really depends of what they did to you. My throat was cut, and part of my stomach was attached to my mouth. At least that is how I understand it. I dont think this will ever be really cured and it will always need dilation. Or a tube to stop it closing. I am also on a permanent peg although not to the stomach I suppose because they have made the stomach smaller. I believe that is why I had a hernia there is not enough room there.  

I dont fully understand when you say not being able to swallow. Is the food pipe open at all. In my case the difficulty of swallowing is more to do with the mouth radiation which has ruined my mouth than the food pipe problem. 

Good evening Alan, my first cancer was the floor of the mouth followed by lower jaw construction were combined with surgery and radiation the swallowing muscles were damaged, so my oesophageal was ok it was the actual swallow that did not ever work again properly so i use my PEG for feeding nowadays, thankfully i can still swallow thin liquids like water, tea, coffee, beer, etc. 

     Maybe your muscles or nerves have been damaged due to the radiotherapy but in some cases, they can repair themselves to a certain extent or further surgery can also be offered. As Dani mentioned is after recent treatment or previous treatment as if it's recent you might get some degree of your swallowing back once you recover from the side affects of the radiotherapy. it is always worth contacting your consultant or a speech and language therapist as they carry out swallow tests and can see the reasons why you cannot swallow. I hope this is of some use. Good luck, take care.

                                                                   Chris