On Thursday when I went to my Cancer Doc, he checked a few things in my nasal cavity, listened to a few of my complaints about my throat and then said he wanted to do an endoscopy. That is, he wanted to look down to my voice box by putting a small straw-like tube down thru my nose.
He sprayed thru my nose, down my throat and the liquid slid right down into my lungs. It felt as if I could not breathe very well.
A few minutes later, he deemed my throat well enough sedated to peer down into it. I felt as if he were the captain of a submarine peering thru the periscope and I was what he was looking at - which incidentally is quite right. :-)
He said, Holy Smokes! Your throat looks as if you have had radiation! Since I had not, he asked if I feel as if I am full of dry mucous and I said Yep. All the time. The roof of my mouth feels like cracked clay when I wake up and it's very uncomfortable. I told him that my eyes are always dry and the corners of my mouth always are cracked and my nose is also dry.
He asked if I have Sjögren's Syndrome and I said I'd never heard of it. So he wrote an order to test for it.
I really doubt I have anything other than dryness from some medication or other. He wrote me a prescription which increases the moisture in mucosa. My eyes are no longer dry, nor my mouth, throat nor nose. I am absolutely in HEAVEN. Whew. If you know someone who has had radiation and is suffering with the dryness, tell them to ask their doctor for a prescription to help relieve the dryness. There IS such a thing and it is called Pilocarpine HCL.
JJ
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