Dear NeuroTalk friends,

My apologies, I have not been on Neurotalk for a couple of weeks due to my husband's delayed funeral and then post-funeral estate paperwork. I just saw jeffreyn's kind message of condolence. Thank you so much, jeffreyn.

In April, my dear husband lost the ability to swallow. He received a stomach tube (PEG tube) and was started on a standardized tube-feeding formula, which he continued to receive until he passed away.

It isn't productive to look back and ask, "What could we have done differently?" But in fact there are two changes which *might* have made a critical difference.

(1) I wish I had pushed harder for him to be allowed to be cared for at home by me and our domestic helper and a nurse. The infections he contracted in the nursing home and various hospitals were what indirectly caused his death; they were all nosocomial bugs, i.e., Clostridium difficile, an MRSA look-alike (a staph with the same sensitivities and resistances as MRSA), another non-MR Staphylococcus aureus, and Vancomycin-resistent Enterococcus. They required treatment by increasingly stronger antibiotics, which wiped out his friendly intestinal bacteria so that he had no resistance whatsoever against new infections.

(2) I would have tried harder to find a dietician who would allow me to give him a blended real food diet rather than the sweet standard tube feeding formula. The sweet formula worsened his pre-existing neurogenic diarrhea, the dietician admitted as much; and, on it, his Parkinson's progressed very rapidly. The latter is what I would expect to happen *if* the fungus theory of Parkinson's was correct. In his last days he was like a man of stone, completely immobile, communicating only with eye-blinks, despite being on Madopar (levodopa and benserazide) tablets.