My neurologist is sending me to a speech therapist to address swallowing problems. I can choke on water too.
I like to go to lunch with friends, but have started ordering soup or taking half of my meal home. It can take me 45 minutes to an hour to eat a meal. What can help me is taking a little sip of water between bites. Juicy foods are easier to swallow. Bread is hard for me, so no sandwiches or hamburgers, except when it’s just my husband and me, but I’m getting so that I don’t even miss those things. Also, I cut large pills in half.

@A MyParkinsonsTeam Member - straws work great for tea, too. Put your cup down and let the table hold it. For hot liquids, I take the straw out between sips. A hot plastic straw might release unwanted chemicals into my tea, and a metal straw gets too hot for my lips unless I do. Type anyway - just proofread well. CTRL-Z will restore any accidentally erased typing. Putting the cursor on a misspelled word then right clicking gives the computer a chance to fix it for you. Changing something you are doing works well, too. Walk, stretch (I like to reach my arms up or to dangle them down & shake them gently & deliberately), eat, whatever. Then try again. I can type while shaking, but no one can understand what I typed until I proofread! [Here is an example of some shakey typing the little brown fox ran into my car andd bafrksd.] Of course, when I Try to turn it loose to show you, I can't reproduce my more humorous typos!

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A MyParki...

Let me try again - 3 is a charm, right? Between trying to use a touch screen and the website not saving my work after I closed up my tablet and got out of bed, I'm starting over. Do not accept “failure” as a result of your swallow test. A speech therapist is a therapist and can give you exercises to teach you how to swallow safely. I would imagine they get tired of patients who won’t do their exercises and just get used to pronouncing “you flunked your swallow test” and that’s it. But just like anything else with PD, the disease tries to make us think that we can’t: that we can’t walk normally again, we can’t button our sleeves, etc. But these motions can be retaught with effort and practice, the same as swallowing. And so far the new neurological pathways I have trained are holding up for walking & buttons, so swallowing is trainable too. Don’t leave without these exercises or at least a subsequent appointment to get them. Scour the internet for some of these exercises. I once found some, but lost them before I could save them to my pc. You are not doomed to a life of pureed foods & thickened liquids from now on. Teach yourself.
In the meantime
Always tuck your chin when swallowing. This closes the epiglottis, the flap of cartilage at the root of the tongue, which is depressed during swallowing to cover the opening of the windpipe. Never Never tip your head back to swallow!
Use a straw for liquids. That way you can more easily tuck your chin at the moment of swallowing.
If you have trouble swallowing solid foods, try jello (works great for pills, too). Be sure to take small bites & chew thoroughly before adding jello. (Besides it’s fun to make or you can buy premade - not gummy, but in little containers.)
There! I wrote this on Google Docs. Time to copy & paste to MPT!

This website sure