Last night I was eating dinner:
- Jasmine rice
- Brie chicken (baked)
- Veggies (carrots, peas, brocolli)
This is entirely unremarkable.
I was eating on our old couch, which is terrible and tends to turn your body into a spaghetti noodle when you sit on it. Your body just naturally tends to slouch. I sit up as straight as I can when eating, but slouching can occur.
Last night I ate and slouched simultaneously, and the consequences of doing this were rendered quickly and severely.
I began to feel a pain in my chest that said, “The food is not going down the way it should per digestion/gravity/etc.” I got up, went to the bathroom and attempted to clear my throat. This has happened a few times before and usually in about ten minutes or less, the food is sufficiently dislodged to allow me to resume eating.
Not this time.
I spent an hour with that increasingly searing chest pain, constantly trying to swallow and failing, having my gag reflex kick in, with resultant attendance to the sink to allow for any food that decided to journey through my system in reverse. It was exhausting. A few sips of water seemed to go down, but when I tried more, it did not and the pain intensified. The water eventually made its way back out.
I decided it was time to get a second opinion or replacement organs at the hospital conveniently next door.
We arrived between 7:30 and 8 p.m. I left just after midnight. It wasn’t even my longest ER visit. But it felt very long.
After checking in, I was issued a K95 mask to replace my own, then moved to a waiting area that is really just the entrance to the emergency room. The hospital has utterly run out of space, which is why I’m not objecting to the construction now happening across the lane from us, as the new hospital building looks like it’s five times bigger.
There was a woman with a baby sitting across from me and the baby was a bit fussy. I tried to not let it stress me out, because relaxing seemed very important in not making the pain worse. Jeff gave me a couple of small white towels. I excused myself, stepped outside and basically barfed into one, though at this point nothing was coming up but liquid. I threw the towel away and returned. I told Jeff to go home. He did.
I later went to the washroom and gagged over the sink. Initially I felt better. I later went back and accidentally swallowed some of my saliva, causing me to choke and cough on it. This went as well as you might expect. The pain at this point seemed unbearable. I tried to think of other things to distract me, like kittens or skateboards.
Eventually I and several others were moved to the next waiting area, to a row of seats with Plexiglas partitions between them. This was also not a real waiting area, it was a hallway, so people and people with equipment were regularly walking past me. Then they parked an XPS right in front of me, which remained there until I got moved to an exam room. An XPS is an eXpandable Patient Surface, not a sleek Dell laptop:
I didn’t realize until later that the two guys with him were not paramedics, but corrections officers. I couldn’t ascertain why he was in, but when a doctor came by and talked to him, I heard something about seizures. I hoped he would not have a seizure in front of me. He did not. When the doctor left, he curled back up to sleep again.
The guy sitting to my right did not have anything obviously wrong with him (spike stuck in head, missing fingers gushing blood, etc.) but as we waited and waited he seemed to become more anxious. He would pull his mask down, take a long breath, exhale slowly, then put the mask back on. He repeated this several times. I almost asked Anxious guy if he was OK. By this point the lodged food had finally started moving down my throat as nature intended, so I was feeling better and my instinct to help kicked in. I ultimately refrained, and he got called in before I did.
I eventually also got called and was taken to an exam room around 10 p.m. By 10:23 I was thinking it would be spiffy if someone came in to see me by 10:30.
Ho ho. How naive I was!
As I slouched on the exam bed, I caught a glimpse of Anxious Guy walking down the hall, this time with his cap removed. His hair looked different than I expected. You can make your hair very mysterious by wearing a cap. I got the impression he might have been giving a urine sample. Conveniently, I could see a collection of such samples across the hall from the exam room, sitting on a counter. One of them looked almost orange. Ew. I reminded myself that I did not have to look at everything while in a hospital.
As time continued to tick by, I began fighting the urge to sleep. With the pain now gone, I was very tired. I thought about finding a nurse and saying I was splitting, that I was totes OK now. I set a deadline of midnight. If a doctor didn’t appear before then, I was getting the heck out of there.
The doctor arrived a few minutes before midnight, so my trick worked! She was very nice and immediately apologized for being so late. After some prodding and poking, she determined that:
- The condition was not cardiac-related
- Was unlikely due to aspirating (food going down the windpipe)
- Was likely food lodging in the esophagus
- Did not require urgent treatment
She recommended I follow up with my doctor and perhaps arrange to have a camera shoved down my throat to see what’s going on in there. I do tend to be a bit phlegmy, which no doubt makes these things worse.
I also promised to sit up straight when eating. She frowned on watching TV while eating. I’m like, “But we don’t even have a table to eat at in the dining room! Also, we have no dining room.” But I didn’t say this to her.
To allay my anxiousness over ever putting food into my mouth again, she suggested I eat a couple of small cookies and drink some juice before leaving, to see if anything horrible might happen. I did so without any notable issue, other than my throat feeling raw from the evening’s shenanigans. I managed to find my way to the exit and walked home under mostly clear skies. I got in at 12:09 a.m., with six minutes already on my exercise ring,. Woo!
Since i’d only had half my dinner before Throat Catastrophe 2021 hit, I decided to eat, but wanted something that would be very difficult to get lodged in my throat. I had a small bowl of ice cream. It did not get lodged.
This morning I felt some trepidation eating breakfast, but it was fine. I’m not sure how I’ll handle meals at the couch. Do they make sit/stand tables for dining?
Anyway, let this be a lesson to all those who would oppose mom’s advice to sit up straight and chew your food. Mom is right!
And no more ER visits for 2021. Or preferably ever, please.
