A new book by Dr. Ianessa Humbert
Keep
Eating
Risk, Pleasure, and the Fight to Stay at the Table
Stories, science, and hard questions about what happens when eating gets complicated, and who gets to decide.
Preordered signed copies will be sent by November 13.
- Publisher
- Swallowology Press
- Signed copies
- Only here
- On Amazon
- November 13
About the book
Eating is never just about food.
Keep Eating: Risk, Pleasure, and the Fight to Stay at the Table explores what happens when one of the most ordinary parts of being human becomes complicated. Through unforgettable patient stories, personal experiences, science, humor, and more than twenty-five years spent thinking about swallowing, Ianessa Humbert examines the choices people face when eating becomes difficult, risky, frightening, or forbidden.
This is not a treatment manual or a prescription to “keep eating” at all costs. It is a book about the questions that emerge when safety, pleasure, independence, identity, and risk collide, and about who ultimately gets to decide what makes a life worth living.
Contents
Inside Keep Eating
Nine chapters and an epilogue, each built around a person, a question, and what swallowing science can and cannot answer.
Chapter 1
The Round Piece
A man drives nine hours hoping someone will help him eat again after living with a feeding tube. His story forces a young swallowing scientist to confront the difference between describing what a swallow does wrong and understanding what a person actually wants from treatment.
Chapter 2
Spittoon
What happens when swallowing your own saliva becomes difficult? A modern-day spittoon, a devoted caregiver, and a problem medicine rarely talks about reveal the enormous burden hidden inside something most of us swallow all day without noticing.
Chapter 3
The Lady from Oz
A childhood encounter with a terrifying piece of ice collides decades later with a woman who travels 9,000 miles for answers about why she cannot swallow, even though her swallow looks normal. It is a story about fear, phagophobia, and learning that what appears normal on an X-ray can feel anything but normal inside someone's body.
Chapter 4
Gums to Bums
A patient arrives worried that she can recognize what she ate long after she ate it. Her story travels through chewing, swallowing, digestion, lifelong habits, and the artificial boundaries healthcare draws between body parts that were designed to work together.
Chapter 5
Super Swallowers
How resilient is the human swallow? From competitive eaters to a woman who discovers she may be able to eat after nine years without food, this chapter asks how much we really understand about the capacity of a system we use thousands of times without thinking.
Chapter 6
The Cost of Being Nice
A spectacular misunderstanding with a student becomes the starting point for a much larger question about politeness, race, access, and healthcare. Sometimes being agreeable keeps an encounter comfortable. Sometimes it keeps important questions from ever being asked.
Chapter 7
Swallowologist
Eating is not the only thing we use our mouths and throats to do. This chapter pushes swallowing care beyond the dinner table and asks what happens when patients bring clinicians questions about intimacy, sexuality, sensation, and other parts of life that do not fit neatly inside traditional professional boundaries.
Chapter 8
The Flapper
An unreliable elevator becomes an unexpectedly useful way to understand an unreliable swallow. Through Curtis and his determination to get back to chili and beer, this chapter explores health literacy: not simply telling people what is risky, but helping them understand their own bodies well enough to make informed choices.
Chapter 9
Play Dice
People are remarkably good at justifying questionable choices when they believe they are doing something good. Starting with a deceptively simple dice experiment, the final chapter turns that uncomfortable idea toward healthcare itself and asks whether protecting people can sometimes become a way of taking decisions away from them.
Epilogue
Who Holds the Dice?
It is easy to say that the person taking the risk should make the decision. But what happens when that person can no longer tell us what they want? The book closes where the questions become hardest: with families, caregivers, clinicians, uncertainty, and the responsibility of holding the dice for someone else.
Who is this book for?
For anyone who eats.
Keep Eating was deliberately written to bring people together rather than divide them into professional and patient audiences. It is for people living with swallowing problems and the people who love and care for them. It is for speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physicians, nurses, dietitians, students, researchers, and other healthcare professionals who influence what people are told they can and cannot eat.
But it is also for people who have never heard the word dysphagia. Eating touches family, culture, pleasure, independence, intimacy, identity, and belonging. You do not need a swallowing disorder or a medical degree to recognize yourself somewhere in these stories.
If you eat, care for someone who eats, work with people who eat, or hope to keep eating for as long as you can, this book is for you.
Only at Swallowing Wellness
A copy signed by
Dr. Humbert
Signed copies are sold only here. Each one is signed and mailed by Dr. Humbert herself.
Preordered signed copies will be sent by November 13.
Signed paperback
plus shipping to your address
$24.99
Preorder nowSigned hardcover
plus shipping to your address
$34.99
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Every edition
Read it, or listen to it.
Paperback
Nov 13
Hardcover
Nov 13
E-book
Nov 13
Audiobook
Nov 13
Coming November 13 on Amazon
About the author
Dr. Ianessa Humbert, PhD, SLP
Ianessa Humbert is a speech-language pathologist, researcher, educator, and the founder of Swallowing Wellness LLC, the first independent outpatient clinic exclusively for swallowing disorders in the Bethesda, Maryland area. She has spent more than twenty-five years studying and treating dysphagia, with a passion for advancing access, equity, and honest conversations about the realities of eating.