Day 4: Emergency Room. Ugh.

If you read my Day 3 post -- that's where this story begins. If you didn't -- let me explain.

(Side note: I woke up 1 pound lighter than the day before -- total weight loss 5 lbs)

For most of my life I've dealt with a "restricted esophagus" -- meaning, the opening of my esophagus is small, making it very easy to get "choked" on food. Over the course of my life, I've learned to live with it. It's apparently prevalent in my family as my dad, aunt, and uncle deal with the same issue. We've got our "tricks" for making things go up or down (disgusting, I know), and we've learned how to mitigate the risks -- i.e. chewing more, smaller bites, softer foods.

Meats are the notorious culprits. So, Wednesday night, as I'm cutting up my vegetables to grill -- I decided to have a few bites of that wonderful pulled pork. Bad idea. Not realizing that my first bite never made it all the way down, the two bites I took after that just added to the problem. I busted out all of the tricks of the trade to no avail. Mind you, this is 6:30 pm...

I try everything I know to try to get this meat to disappear, one way or the other. No luck. Stress and anxiety seem to make it worse, so I decide to go to bed (in hindsight, quite possibly the most foolish think I've ever done..). Lucky for me, I wake up.

Meet Thursday morning (Day 4) -- 6:00 am. As I get up for work, I decide to take a drink of water to see if said bbq had decided to be on its merry way. Again, bad idea. Water just sat in my throat on that piece of meat until it decided to make it's grand reappearance (the water, not the meat). I called my mom who instructed my stubborn self to go to the ER...

Like a good daughter -- I followed the instructions.

Got to the ER around 6:30 and waited patiently for my turn. Lucky for me -- I was the only soul in there! Mom drove from home to meet me, and Joe came, too! (Insert note that I'm incredibly lucky to have people who drop everything to come to me, even when I'm stubborn and tell them not to!)

The ER doctor came in, we discussed the issue, and he told me there were two options. We could try giving me a muscle relaxer to hopefully relax my esophagus and allow the meat to go down (20% chance of working), and if that wasn't successful, I would have to be put to sleep, scoped, and have the meat pushed down into my stomach. (I'm afraid of needles, so I liked neither of these options...)

We tried the muscle relaxer first -- through an IV (kill me. I hate needles.) -- yep. totally didn't work. Just my luck!

I finally was able to see the gastrointestinal doctor (who was awesome!) around noon. I was sedated, had a scope put down my throat to locate the meat, the meat was then pushed down into my stomach (the size of a half dollar, might I add.), then a balloon was placed in my esophagus and expanded to stretch it out in hopes of correcting my restriction. (Yes, I have pictures, but I will spare you the disgusting.)

When I woke up -- I was the life of the party.. drunker than downtown cootie brown. Hilarious and sarcastic, no doubt. Mom took a video.... I'll have to delete that.

So -- what did I eat on Day 4?.... well... I went nearly 24 hours with no food or drink, not cool. I was instructed to eat soft/liquid food for a day or two. We went to Newks, one of the few places I knew I could get good soup, and I ended up having potato soup. Yes, I know, not South Beach Diet approved. Did I care? NO. I was starving and doing as instructed.

So - for day 4 I have no good recipes, a not so good ER story, and a fantastic bowl of potato soup. Yep, that sums it up.

--T