Well, in other news, my throat is still trying to kill me. It came close a few years ago when the Grim Reaper apparently tired of his boring ole scythe and got creative in his methods. Had my wife not been there to administer the Heimlich, my death certificate would read, “Death by butter bean.”  All my life I’ve struggled to eat healthy, thinking that Bojangles would probably do me in. Then I nearly die from a vegetable—talk about irony. 

So three endoscopies and many thousands of dollars later, my esophagus was sufficiently expanded to once again allow safe passage of food—this was two years ago. The problem is white blood cells still like to hang out in my esophagus and practice strangulation in their free time. The doctors tell me that this is not normal, that only 1 in 1000 people have the condition, that there’s no good way to treat it other than to restretch my throat every few years, ideally before my white blood cells commit murder. 

I’m hoping I can make it three years between endoscopies because I don’t relish the idea of having my throat roto-rootered again. Done in an outpatient facility, it’s a routine procedure, except when it isn’t. Before my third endoscopy, while I was waiting in the prep room with an IV in my arm, I got to hear one of those “when it isn’t” cases. The prep room is right beside the operating room. Normally, you can’t hear the doctors and nurses talking as they work on whoever is scheduled before you, unless something bad is happening, in which case everyone is shouting and running and alarms are blaring. I just remember one nurse shouting “heart rate 180” and the doctor using the expression “stat” as in “get an ambulance here stat.” The nice old lady having the procedure done before me, who smiled at me while we were both in the waiting room, was having a heart attack on the table. 

I often wonder what happened to that lady, a complete stranger, after she was transported to the hospital. As they wheeled me into the operating room, because, well, the show must go one, I’m not sure who was more shell-shocked, the doctor, nurses, or me. Sensing I was perhaps disconcerted by the preceding event, one nurse tried to calm my trembling skeletal structure with some reassuring words, which, to be honest, paled in reassurance to the valium she shot in my IV.

The next thing I know, I’m waking up at home with a sore throat and a bad case of hiccups. But that beats waking up in a hospital or not waking up at all. So, all in all, I have a lot to be thankful for, even if my throat is still trying to kill me.