"I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years..."
In my understanding, swallowing anything is difficult to impossible for patients in a genuinely comatose state. That's why I asked, not that I hadn't read the article.