November 29, 2012

Message

It's OKAY to have a phobia.  Phobias are defined as irrational fears.  Yet, most phobias are far from irrational.  The best thing to do is find a competent, caring psychologist (or psychiatrist) who can help you through your fears.  Or who can at least lend an ear to letting you vent about them.

I've never been able to find anyone who will listen about my own phobia:  swallowing.  Right now I'm having a seriously hard time eating because over the past few weeks I've developed some kind of fear that I will choke at any moment.  As I'm chewing, my chest and stomach begin to feel bloated and I feel the need to burp.  Just as I begin to swallow, I burp instead and it makes me start gagging and I don't know what to do.  I try burping right before I swallow to see if that helps, but what I usually end up doing is gripping the edge of the table as I force myself to swallow, or gripping the arm of the chair.  I also usually end up abandoning what I'm eating halfway through.  I go through phases of the problem every few months.  It makes eating at work tough because I'm embarrassed when people can see me eating.

I've tried to tell a few people about this.  Namely, I've told some doctors and my psychology professor from college.  They all laughed at me.  My professor told me he had never, ever heard of something like this (and he was in his sixties).  Another doctor told me I was just ridiculous.  Another looked right at me and asked, "Are you a little sissy girl?"

Sometimes it gets so bad I can't swallow liquid.  Once my mother took me out to eat and I couldn't even eat little pieces of crab.  A lot of times I resort to crunchy food because it breaks down into smaller pieces as opposed to, say, bread, which becomes a giant clump in my mouth and I have to roll it around trying to separate it into smaller bites.

Crazy, right?  I don't know what to do.  I talk to those doctors, hoping they'll give me advice, like what they would tell someone with a narrow esophagus or an extremely sensitive gag reflex.  But instead they laugh at me.  One even told me, when I asked him to reassure me that I won't choke, that I could in fact choke on something as small as a pea.  He said it quite dismissively.  He could have lied.  He could have tried to help me.  Instead he just made the situation even worse.

It's exhausting to eat.  It's a fight.  Should I ask for some kind of anxiety pills that I take an hour or so before eating (which I would have to crush up and put in pudding)?  Is there a trick to sort of hypnotize myself?  Should I start collecting recipes that only use crunchy foods?  I don't know what to do.

1 comment:

  1. You know what? I think you have an actual problem with your esophagus. You've actually had stuff STICK in your throat (pills, whatever). Dr. BB has this problem and it's a serious problem. He has to have his esophagus scoped every two years to make it wider and he has been diagnosed with something called eosiniphilic esophigitis, which is kind of like asthma for the esophagus and it leads to inflammation of the esophagus.

    This is also why Dr. BB is the last one at the table for every meal. He chews everything he eats to a fine paste before he swallows. (Two nights ago, we had frittata and baked potatoes for dinner. I was finished in about seven minutes. I got up and started cleaning the kitchen up and had moved on to fussing with the Christmas decorations before he was finished.)

    He's had pills stick in his throat before. Right now he takes a tiny, tiny pill in the morning for acid reflux and we were able to find a gluten-free multivitamin that is a soft gel and he poke a hole in it and then squeezes the liquid into a spoon to take it because he can't swallow the whole pill. He refuses to take Tylenol or Aleve for any type of pain because the size of the pills makes him nervous. We actually don't know if they would actually stick because he hasn't tried them recently.

    There are tests for this where they make you drink a gross barium concoction and then make you swallow increasingly large-sized pills until one gets stuck to see how narrow your esophagus is. It's not pleasant, but it did show Dr. BB just how far his esophagus would stretch (farther than he thought - not as far as a "normal" person). This test would SUCK for you and make you pretty anxious (it certainly did for Dr. BB), but it might end up reassuring you that you can deal with larger sized foods than your previously thought.

    There is nothing here that a medical professional would not take seriously. You could choke (and if it is indeed on something the size of a pea then it's more serious than what we deal with in our house). They can make it wider or give you other medications to decrease the swelling of your esophagus.

    Also, because this isn't already the longest comment in the history of comments, you might have pockets in your esophagus where food is getting stuck. I forget what this is called, but basically instead of being a shoot that your food just slides down, some people develop these little side pocked that food slides by 99% of the time, but then food gets stuck in them once in a while and it sucks because it takes a long, long, long time for that food to dissolve.

    None of this is stuff that a medical professional should brush off. It's serious stuff.

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