Q:

Properly suctioning mouth of infant with bulb syringe

My 5 month old is having a horrible time with a cold currently.  He's been progressively producing a large amount of phlegm - now to the point that he's coughing almost continuously and having a hard time eating and sometimes breathing.  My spouse and I have tried steaming the bathroom with hot showers, as well as using humidifiers but it's not breaking up the mucus enough for him to effectively cough it up.  
Is there a proper way to suction a baby's mouth with a bulb syringe?  Everything that I've searched for and read states that a baby can be suctioned via mouth or nose with a bulb syringe but all examples only show descriptions and steps of suctioning the nose, not the mouth. 

A:

From your description, suctioning the mouth is not what you need, in fact there are only a very few cases where it useful to suction the mouth at all.
Loosening the phlegm from the lungs/throat can be relatively straightforward. Steaming a room as you have been doing should help, but what worked for us was to have our baby lying gave down across my knees, head a little lower, and clapping or tapping her back. It doesn't need to be hard, but five minutes of this in the morning really makes a difference.
If the problem really persists, you could speak to your GP about the use of a nebulizer.

