Friday, February 20, 2009

I scream, you scream, we all scream for an esophageal endoscopy!

Apparently I am lax in telling my parents and family important things that are going on in my life. So here goes I spent the evening of Feb 18th in the ER. As some of you may know I have a narrow esophagus. If you notice the lovely picture, the image on the left side is a normal esophagus and the image to the right, according to my wife who actually saw the pictures, looks more like mine. I has happened in the past , more times than I care to admit, that in my exuberant love affair with food, that I put more down my drinking straw of a throat than it can handle. I am not choking, I can breathe just fine, I just can’t swallow anything. As long as my salivatory reflex is not working overtime I can occasionally wait it out until though the forces of nature, magic, and tectonic plate movement the obstruction clears.

Unfortunately this time my blood sugar decided to drop at the same time. In and of itself this is not a life threatening or even an overly dangerous thing. The common correction is to eat sugar (or something containing it, though I have resorted to spoonfuls of the granular stuff in the past). But when you have something logged in your esophagus and can’t get anything into your stomach that could then disseminate into the rest of your body, the sum threat becomes much greater than these two relatively minor parts.

Long story made short:

Lodged Steak + Too Much Insulin in Blood = Trip to the ER

So now you know, and knowing is half the battle…the other half is a really sore throat and a big hospital bill.