10/08/2026
There is a patient I still think about, all these years later.
He is one of the reasons I do all of this.
Early in my career, I was working in a rural Missouri nursing home with the tools I had. A clinical swallow evaluation, my best judgment, and a referral for a swallow study that took months to come through.
He was NPO for months while we waited. Months without eating, without drinking, without the small comfort of a meal, while I did everything I could with information that could not actually show me what was happening in his throat.
We finally got the appointment. He was transported out for the study. He came back without it. The C-arm was broken.
We were back to square one, and the waiting started over.
I still regret that I could not get him the answers he deserved. I think about him often.
That was the moment something changed in me. I stopped being angry at the system and decided I was done waiting for it. I went and learned to scope, so I would never again have to tell a patient to keep waiting while I guessed.
It took me years.
A mentor I had to search for.
A scope I had to figure out how to finance.
More imposter syndrome and more mistakes than I want to admit.
I got there anyway, and now I get to be the person my patients were waiting on.
Here’s the most important part... There are patients in rural communities all over this country, NPO and waiting, while a capable SLP nearby does their best with a tool that cannot see the swallow. That SLP could change everything for them. They just need someone to show them how.
That is why I built the FEES Expansion Framework.
Everything I learned the slow, hard, expensive way, in one place, so you can become the person the patients in your community are waiting on, without the years of trial and error it took me.
We start the week of January 8, and it is half off through the end of October before the price goes up.
Comment FRAMEWORK and I’ll send you everything.
He is the reason I started. You might be the reason someone else finally gets their swallow study.
