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My father is in hospice care and has developed excessive saliva and coughs a lot especially when he eats (his food is pureed and we put Thick-It in drinks). The hospice nurse has given him medication to reduce the amount of saliva. The medication helped initially but now he is back to coughing; it sounds like bronchitis to me. However, he has no fever, his lungs are clear, and his blood pressure is good. What else can be done to make him more comfortable? Thank you.

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HI! I would assume the hospice nurse got you some sort of levsin or atropine drops. You might also ask for scopalamine patches. You just put one behind an ear and only change every 3 days. Helps a lot of my patients. Also swab mouth a lot with sponge swabs...hospice should provide these. You can just use them dry to soak up secretions too
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My mom pockets a lot of saliva. I care for her at home. I got the doctor to prescribe a suction machine. When I cannot coax her to swallow, by giving her a piece of a cookie, I slide the tube from the machine into the side of her mouth. I push it gently against her teeth until she separates her teeth to bite it, lol, then I slide it on the the side of her tongue and it sucks out the saliva. You might want to let them know this at the facility.
God Bless.
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Hm, this sounds very familiar. I don't mean to alarm you but they told me my mom's lungs were clear too although she sometimes coughed and gagged so much that I was sure she was drowning in her own saliva. After a couple of months of this she took a sudden turn for the worse and died of aspiration pneumonia.
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