btreglown
New member
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2008
- Messages
- 6
- Reason
- Loved one DX
- Country
- US
- State
- Georgia
- City
- Rome
Hello, I joined this forum about a month ago when my grandmother (who is 75 years old) was diagnosed with ALS. We went to Emory in Atlanta to the ALS Clinic about a month ago to get a second opionion. She has bulbar syptoms. She has massive amounts of salava that run out of her mouth (she has a pill to dry this up but she says it makes her mouth to dry), we can no longer understand her hardly, she gets choked when she eats, and the worse part is that she also has pluminary fibrosis in her lungs. So, she got the PEG tub right after our visit to Emory because the suggested it before her breathing got to bad. Her breathing tests register at 40%. We visited the ALS Clinic yesterday (back to Emory on Clinic day to meet all the theropists and doctors). Dr. Glass suggested that she made a decission about a ventilator and that she stops eating with her mouth all together. Well, she got choked last night and we had to call 911 because we could not get her to breath. Finally my mom did the hymnic and she started breathing. My questions, does anyone have a ventilator and how does it work? How can we convince her to stop eating? How does one deal with the salava that runs out of your mouth? If one is choking and has a PEG tube, is it safe to do the hymnic? Does anyone have the cough assist? How do they think it is useful? Sorry for all the qustions as they have started to pile up.
Beth
Beth