My MIL 89 with advanced vascular dementia, shovels food into her mouth at an alarming rate. Today she ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in about six minutes flat. I cut her food up and mash it have given smaller portions have given a smaller fork, but it’s like she’s in a race to get her food down to the point where she chokes . She will not/can not comprehend or listen when we ask her to slow down. We encourage her to take a drink to wash the food down, have taken her fork away until she’s chews and swallows but then she gets defiant and flatly refuses. Is anyone else having these issues and can give me any advice? Thank you.
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But if you are concerned about how your MIL is eating then perhaps it best that someone actually feeds her thus allowing her to get just one bite at a time and not shoving things in her mouth.
And the fact that she may be choking is very common with folks with dementia and may have absolutely nothing with her eating too fast, but instead of the fact that when one's brain is broken the brain forgets to tell the throat to close thus allowing food to get into the lungs and aspiration pneumonia can then occur, which in most cases is deadly.
So I would make sure at this point that you're feeding your MIL only pureed foods and thickening her drinks with the product Thick-It, as that will help keep her from aspirating her food.
If MIL is “89 with advanced vascular dementia”, and that’s the way she wants to eat, is it really a problem if she chokes? Perhaps this is just one more thing that’s not worth a battle about.