Sneezing
I am a 67 year old man who has had Parkinson's for 6 years. Yes there have been changes in my life in many ways, falls, nightmares, anxiety, stiffness and the like but compared to many others I am okay mostly day to day. In the midst of Covid, I lost my sense of smell and taste and they have never returned, so everything that I eat just tastes like cardboard, given that these problems may have been caused by Covid or Parkinson's, I guess that its just one of those things, so I get on with my life and yes I count my blessings every day. My most distressing problem on a day to day basis is that after I have been eating for so long, maybe in a restaurant or even at home,I suddenly start to sneeze and when it starts, it continues to such an extent that I have to abandon my meal and just give up. You may imagine, in a restaurant setting, this can be very embarrassing because people start to look and stare, I suppose that they imaging that I am going to infect them. My specialist has advised me that this may be due to my mouth producing too much saliva which travels to my nose and causes me to sneeze. He could give me medication that would reduce this, but he said the unwanted side effects may be dry eyes and even more constipation, so I declined. I wonder if any other members have had similar experiences and if so, did they find anything helpful. Thank you for reading my post.
Hi
thanks for sharing with us. I would be interested to hear from the community on any similar experiences. Do you find your sneezing more frequent if you are eating spicy food or does it not matter? Jill (Team Member) Hi Jill, thank you for coming back to me. Spicy foods thankfully don't effect me because I love them as they are the only thing I can actually taste, so the hotter the better in that regard. It is essentially the amount of chewing that I have to do that affects me. For instance if I ate a rice putting which takes next to no chewing, I am not affected, but when I ate a small fish with some chips, that would effect me. So its the lengthy chewing that sets me off sneezing. I hope that this clarifies that for you. Thank you for taking an interest in my post. Best wishes Arnold Baker I am glad you can enjoy spicy foods. I found this forum discussion about excess saliva, a few people mentioned tips that helped them, I hope this can help you: https://parkinsonsdisease.net/forums/excessive-saliva. Jill (Team Member)
