We had a great turnout to see Julie Parry’s presentation on Speech and Language Therapy in relation to head and neck cancer. Julie is an SLT Therapist based at Royal Stoke. The meeting was held in the larger room, so Julie could use a projector to illustrate her talk with a series of slides, and she also provided handouts of the slides for later reference. Around 25 were present.
A big thank you to Julie from all of us for a very informative and interesting evening. Despite having an extremely busy work life, Julie gave up her own time to do this. Plenty of questions arose both during and after the talk and a lot of discussion within the group ensued.
Receiving a diagnosis for any form of head and neck cancer is a huge blow, and in the early days it’s hard to take much information in. At some stage, a consultant will list the possible side-effects of the treatment (usually a long list!) and somewhere on the list will be speech and language issues. These include difficulties with swallowing, chewing, taste and other aspects of eating and drinking.
The three ‘rollercoaster’ stages for patients are Diagnosis, Treatment and immediate Post Treatment. I think it’s fair to say that there is little time to discuss or really understand SLT problems during these phases so it was really useful to spend time away from a hospital setting to have all the aspects explained so clearly. Many, if not most of the patients at the meeting have experienced at least some of the problems, and I think it’s always a bit of a relief to realise you’re not the only one going through it. Some may not have realised that there ARE things that can help, even long after treatment so the session ended on a positive note.
