Speech Therapy can be very important for folks with PD, for 2 reasons

There are 2 reasons why speech therapy is important for folks with PD.: : (1) Communication: PD can change your voice. Your speech may be so hoarse that people who hear it think you most certainly had begun smoking in utero. While they can't imagine the logistsics of pulling that off, they can't imagine another way to explain it. And if folks can't understand what you say, they become reluctant to engage in conversation with you. It's just too hard.

(2) The muscles you use for speaking are the same ones you use for swallowing. You may have noticed that the standard way of getting food into your belly involves your mouth and throat. And if those muscles atrophy you must find some other avenue for your food to get into your stomach. Eating a nice steak, a potato smothered in sour cream, and perhaps a lovely salad or dessert is a very nice way to gain sustenance.

But if the primary pathway doesn't work very well, you may aspirate food into your lungs and develop pneumonia. You may not mind the first hospitalization for penumonia, but by the time the number of hospitaliztions reaches a 2-digit number, you might not be too keen on it.

Then the alternative is to have a port into your belly, mix some nutritional but not particularly tasty substances into a blender and put a funnel into that port in your belly and have your food by-pass your mouth and throat entirely. You might be able to deal with that for a while, but I imagine that, particularly around the holiday season, you might wish you had been a tad more diligent with your speech therapy excercises.

I have had this discussion with myself fom time to time, but alas, I can be about the most obstinate of creatures to ever have walked the earth and as I hear my voice getting more and more hoarse, I grow increasingly anxious about the consequences of my lackadaisical approach to the whole thing.

One of the best exercises involves a water bottle and a tube. You fill the water bottle about three inches. The tube is maybe a foot or 18 inches long . it is roughly the diameter of my thumb. You must put the tube in the bottle and blow into it as you sing.

This brings back memories of family dinners every Sunday after church. We often went to the local cafeteria which had lucious fried chicken of fried fish, and Jello salads, fresh vegetables, and desserts to die for. Sometimes kids get bored even at a meal involving these delights, and they decide that putting a straw in their coke and blowing bubbles into it will help beguile the tediium of the meal that seems to be well on its way to the longest meal in all of Christendom. This behaviour would not be tolerated by the adults.

So this particular exercise brings back memories of the punishments that followed blowing bubbles in my coke in that long-defunct cateteria.

It also requires singing. If my life depended on it, I could not carry a tune in a wooden bucket. I'm certain that I could make a living by charging people to NOT sing at their weddings. And, while singing at a wedding requires your physical presence, not singing at that wedding can be done from anywhere and (theoreticallly) you could not sing at many weddings simultaneously.

Alas, that's another enterprise that didn't pan out for me. Since my singing caused others pain, and I didn't enjoy it mself and rarely do it, I have no lyrics. And, of course, there's the profound lack of will do to it

But, after having several conversations with myself regarding the possibility of having a port in my belly for whatevery remains of my lilfe, I've almost convinvced myself to work on it. My speech therapist is young, caring, charming and really commited to helping her clients develop ways to normalize their lives as much as they can, so I'm sure it pains her to hear me getting increasingly worse .

Having put myself in time-out numerous times, I think I have come up with a solution. It's a common song with very easy lyrics (Its lyrics are simple - 12 words.) And unlike the songs on American Bandstand, it's not necessary to be able to dance to it, nor are the lyrics reqired to be touching. So I think I'm going to surprise my sweet speech therapist Monday morning when she comes to endure yet again my recalcitrance and I surprise her by singing my song to her. I'm sure you'e heard of it and most likely have sung it s time or two yourself. The first line of lyrics go like this, "99 bottles of beer on the wall....." Do you think she'll like it?