"It didn't take me long to figure out," says Jillian Hunnicutt of Atlanta, Ga., pausing to grin at her unintentional pun. "There was something about Mary."

Mary, now 6 years old, is the youngest daughter of Hunnicutt and her husband, Timothy. "Remember, I had already gone through two little girls, and I knew all about fussy eaters – or so I thought," Hunnicutt says. "Sure, I knew about tossed mashed potatoes, overturned bowls of spaghetti and little noses turned up at whatever we were offering. But with the older girls, the worst we had to handle was a 'raspberry' blown with a mouth full of peas."

"With Mary, eating dinner was living on the edge," Hunnicutt says. "She would have a hard time chewing even the softest of meals. Sometimes she would choke, her eyes would water and her breathing would slow. Eventually, she wouldn't want to eat at all. With that experience, who could blame her?"

Mary – and an estimated six to 15 million people in the United States, many of them children – is a victim of dysphagia, a mechanical dysfunction that manifests in a difficulty to chew or swallow. "Simply stated, a person with dysphagia is unable to pass food or liquid rapidly or efficiently from the mouth to the stomach," says Dr. Michael E. Groher, speech pathologist and author of Dysphagia: Diagnosis and Management.

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