nothing but HAT's: Just a bit of Riesen

I will not be joining the cast of House, unfortunately. As of Friday evening, I was cleared of all skeletal remains of aquatic vertebrates. (My apologies for not reporting this sooner.) I have lost the fishbone, but have gained a newfound appreciation of the body and its mechanisms. This is the last and final update on my fishbone swallowing incident:

Up through Friday morning, I was still coughing with phlegm because the bone was still stuck somewhere in the back of my throat. By lunchtime, there was a consistent throbbing pain to the right side of my neck, but lower, slightly closer to my clavicle. Plus, I started feeling a heaviness in my chest cavity -- the weight felt similar to a bronchitis-infected lung. I knew my body was trying to fight the foreign object in whatever way possible.

I called the Advice Hotline again after lunch and the Advice nurse took all the information and consulted with the triage nurse, Dr. Oliver, who suggested that I come into the Emergency Room. The coughing and phlegm were indicators that they needed to examine me and the clinic probably didn't have the necessary equipment to look down my throat (if it came to that).

It's a trout bone -- very fine, tiny -- and also impossible to see, apparently, so I didn't think it was a big deal. I just thought it would pass eventually, and going to the ER seemed quite excessive. Of course they had to say that I needed to go to the doctors. They didn't want me suing them for giving bad advice just in case the bone I swallowed was 5 cm long. Partially to relieve my own anxieties and partially to let her off the hook, I told the nurse that I would go to the ER.

By 3:30 p.m., it was much more uncomfortable, and the heaviness in the chest was much more pronounced, so my sister and I went to the ER. Looking back, it seems rather silly, and a tremendous waste of time. Nevertheless, I trekked in and the ER guard scanned me then sent me into the waiting room. They filled out paperwork, paid my $50 co-pay and met with the triage nurse, Doug Clark (who looked like the elder brother of Rob Lowe, by the way). He took all my info and tried to get my blood pressure three times. Then they told me to wait for an x-ray.

I was standing in that x-ray room when it fully dawned on me how utterly stupid I was for wasting all this time, energy, and money on such a minor thing. Add to that, the x-ray technician thought it was extremely funny that this was not the first time I swallowed a fishbone. Bless his heart he tried his very best to not say what I'm sure they were all thinking in their heads.

It took two doctors plus an ENT doctor (Ear, Nose, Throat) to say that they could not find a bone in my x-ray. However, according to the nurse, b/c my x-ray "looked weird" (it must be a medical code or something? haha!), they had to have a doctor examine my throat. By now, I was extremely uncomfortable, and it wasn't because I still had the invisible fishbone in my throat but b/c I was waiting in the ER hallway on one of those roll-away beds while ER staff were wandering about trying to help really sick people.

Nurse Adaobi gave me one of those fancy hospital gowns with the "fetching" slit in the back and I waited for Dr. So-and-So. He was a short statured man, who tried his best to be serious and listened to my explanations with as much interest as he could muster. Then they poked down my throat. Adaobi held the flashlight, and the doctor used all the gauzes and gloves and stuff they had available to hold my tongue while poking around with one of those long handled silver sticks with a flat mirror on the end. Anyway, save for him almost gagging me to death he couldn't find anything for certain. Actually, what he said was he thought he saw something but wasn't sure. He ran in and out of my room and the x-ray viewing room several times looking down my throat and checking the x-rays, but in the end, it was useless.

They could not find any bone, without any certainty, so they had to say there was a possible foreign object in the back of my throat. To avoid gagging me to death, the ENT folks would have to use special equipment to look down my throat. Unfortunately, they were already began a four-hour operation on a patient so I would have to wait or come back. None of us thought it was important enough to warrant my waiting for four hours, so he pre-scheduled an appointment for me with the ENT department on Monday morning just in case I needed to come back in. He said thank you and that was all. Threehours and $50 later, I was done.

We went to get the car and paid for our parking. As I waited to exit the lot, I ate a piece of Riesen candy -- and would you believe it -- the chewy, chocolatey candy dislodged the bone. It was a teensy bit of trout bone, and I'm sure the doctor helped dislodge the bone when he and his nurse was examining my throat. The fishbone itself was quite insignificant. A minor blip among the many, many greater things in life, yet it caused the most drama I've had in ages.