July 13, 2020
It's been about a month and a half since my husband's regular diet was replaced with pureed foods and thickened beverages. He's been drinking Ensure nutritional supplement, also, since his dramatic weight loss began.
The past couple of weeks, he's been having more and more trouble swallowing even the pureed foods. He seems to hold the spoonful in his mouth for a long time, finally chews it, and eventually either swallows it, spits it out, or chokes on it. For the past week, he has been eating and drinking very little and even "refusing" to eat at all, meaning he doesn't open his mouth or doesn't swallow the first spoonful.
Yesterday, one of the caregivers experimented with thickening the Ensure with just enough of the pureed food to make it the same consistency as the thickened beverage he usually consumes, eventually. He was successful in patiently spoon feeding a glassful of this concoction to my husband for lunch and dinner. He is attempting to do the same today.
I know that my husband will eventually forget how to swallow (or will not want to. Who knows if it's forgetting or refusing?). It looks as though that may be sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I've contacted the hospice nurse to see about changing his food "order" from a pureed diet to a liquified diet. It's worth a try.
I am curious, when his ability to swallow on his own happens will they place a feeding tube? Or does his DNR prevent them from doing anything like this, or is it not a life saving action? I know a young man who was undergoing a heart surgery for a birth defect at around 13, and there was an accident during the operation and somehow his brain was deprived of oxygen that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He can't speek but has a device he can use his line of sight and blinking to carry on a conversation and is really quite intelligent and has a great disposition and is now in his early 30s. One of the things he can't do is eat, drink, or swallow but they use a large syringe to give him fluids and nourishment. The have a flexible tube that attaches to the syringe and goes into his throat enough to get past anything that could cause choking or not enter the stomach easily. It's really not pleasant to look at but the liquid nourishment he gets is the same concoction they use in a feeding tube.
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