Mealtime demands alertness. Dad hasn’t been able to feed himself for a couple of years. Every bite and every swallow now are delivered by the hand of another. Until recently Mom fed him breakfast (usually oatmeal) and lunch (often a sandwich or a salad), and I fed him dinner. But his increasing frequency of choking prompted her to ask me to start feeding him breakfast a couple of months ago.
For as long as I can remember he has had the habit of taking drink and, before swallowing, swishing the liquid around in his mouth. Now, this habit has the downside of causing him to swallow air each time, which inevitably leads to burps followed by hiccups, before the meal is done. Most people can successfully manage a burp or a hiccup while their mouths hold food– some extra attention is briefly required, but it usually doesn’t result in choking. However, Dad’s loss of capacity makes it difficult for him to manage these unwelcome coincidences, and he has come close to choking a few times.
In the most serious incident, I had just fed Dad a very small piece of the pork roast we were having for dinner. Very soon it was clear that he had inhaled, rather than swallowed, it. He grabbed his chest and just stared ahead. He managed to blurt out “oh my lord” and then began to cough. He was soon stuck in a gagging reflex and gobs of sticky mucus began coming up his throat and out of his mouth. After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to help him clear the mucus, I called 911. I had never seen this reaction before. He didn’t have total airway blockage YET, but I thought he might be in danger of literally drowning in the mucus. I reached my hand inside his mouth to pull out as much of the sticky stuff as I could. He continued to struggle and occasionally coughed. We kept that up for perhaps ten minutes until the EMTs arrived. Just as Mom let them in the front door, Dad coughed forcefully and that little piece of pork, perhaps a quarter inch square, spilled out with the mucus.
Although he appeared to be recovering the EMTs thought he should get a chest x-ray and they quickly got him into the ambulance. As I filled out the required paper work, I could see Dad through the ambulance window, sitting upright, fully composed, looking around and taking in the odd surroundings.
To make a long story short, his x-ray showed no problems, and we spent the next five hours, until about 2a.m., trying to get out of the hospital and back home. The next day, I sought out some tips from a speech therapist on how to improve swallowing and I will pass those along in another post.