My husband has been in the nursing home just over two months and seems to be adjusting pretty well. He eats well, spends his days in a merry walker, is incontinent, can not speak and has to be hand fed. I generally go each evening and feed him his dinner. Sometimes he seems to understand what is said to him, others not so much. A couple of times this week as we sat in the lounge area after dinner I noticed him stick his thumb in his mouth. He didn't so much suck on it but just held it there. I just wondered if anyone else has dealt with this and maybe if it is just something comforting like a child sucking the thumb or if it could be a sign of something else.

My husband doesn't suck his thumb, however, he constantly licks his thumb nail. I have noticed that he closes his eyes when he does this. He did suck his thumb as a child.

I thought about the smoking thing too. Yes, he was a smoker for 50 years. He stopped slowly over the the past several months, on his own. That has been one of the stranger things about his illness. I read all the posts here and hear about those who are angry because they can not drive, or do the work they used to do and Charlie never did any of that. He was a perfectionist who felt that if you couldn't do something right, don't do it at all. He gradually stopped driving on his own, simply going to the passenger side more and more. He cut down on smoking when he could no longer work the lighter but a few times a day he would pick up a cigarette and I would light it for him. He got really upset when he started dropping them because he was always very particular about being careful so as not to start a fire. He cut back more then. After a while he would pick up an unlit cigarette, look at it as if he didn't know what to do with it and lay it back down. That is when I stopped buying them for him and he didn't seem to miss them but I do wonder if that is not what he is thinking about when he sticks his thumb in his mouth.