Tuesday, February 7, 2023

I’m a mouth breather, and have been for as long as I can remember and to my knowledge I never had any problems associated with it. However, since starting chemo, at night my mouth gets so dry I pretty much have to peel my upper and lower lip away from my teeth just to get my tongue loose.

Elizabeth sent me some candies meant to help with the problem. I tried them but they didn’t dissolve quickly or easily in my mouth and often left me with sores on my tongue and cheek. After that I was attempting to manage the dryness by rinsing my mouth with water and then having a drink. Because I was drinking so much during the day I was up every couple of hours to the bathroom anyway, I decided this was the best I could do.

But then we got inventive. I tried sleeping wearing a medical mask. The theory was that whatever moisture I exhaled would be inhaled on my next breath. That didn’t even last a whole night. The mask bugged me and I didn’t feel like I got any sleep.

Next we tried keeping a wet facecloth by the bed. When I woke up in the night I would suck on the cloth and get a little moisture but not so much that I needed more bathroom breaks. The method worked well until the facecloth dried up in the middle of the night.

But we were getting more ideas based on that attempt. We thought we could get a small spray bottle, fill it with water and spray water into my mouth as needed. We didn’t have a sprayer that we knew would be clean enough but then I had another idea – a child’s sippy cup. We scoured the cupboards looking for one that one of the grandkids might have left behind but had no luck. Pat bought a new, and I guess improved, one that has a straw. It was hard to get the cup tipped at the right slant so that it wasn’t a huge effort to get a drink.

After a google search it mentioned chewing sugarless gum – problem solved. I chewed half a piece when I went to bed and then just tucked it under my upper lip until I needed to chew it a bit more to get the saliva working. The gum lost its flavour in the middle of the night so I just used the other half.

From the time the chewing gum was mentioned I couldn’t get this song out of my mind:

Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?If your mother says, don’t chew it do you swallow it in spite? Can you catch it on your tonsils? Can you heave it left and right? Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?

Kathryn arrives late this afternoon and I can pretty much guarantee there will be no chewing gum on her bedpost.