Just call me Fishbone

Damn it's been a minute since I updated this thing! Grad school is such a time sucker, I'm telling you.

Recently I had a harrowing experience with a fishbone that I'd like to tell you all about. Over Thanksgiving I was in London with about 40 MBA students attending an event called London Banking Days. This is the second year that I've gone for this event and honestly, it's a great trip because I really don't have to do much besides schmooze with recruiters and students and have lots of cocktails and canapes at receptions and dinners. All was going swimmingly until my last cocktail reception on Friday evening. It was at a posh bar/restaurant called Le Coq d'Argent right in the heart of London's financial district. I had consumed one to many tequila shots the night before at the behest of the Latin MBA contingent so I wasn't actually drinking anything at this particular event. Just as I was about to leave I decided to grab a little cake (what I thought would be crab) from a passing plate of hors d'oeurves. During the last bite of that little sucker my troubles began. Turns out it was a fish cake and had a BONE in it. A bone that got stuck in my throat. And chilled there for SEVEN WHOLE DAYS.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I swallowed that last bite of course. The bone poked me every time I swallowed. Did you know that we swallow saliva every 20 seconds or so? Yeah. So for the next week, I got stabbed every time I swallowed anything unless I held my head at a certain angle and pressed on my throat in a certain way. The whole experience was rather unpleasant to say the least.

On Sunday night I called my mom to ask her advice. WedMD had said something about eating doughy bread and then going to the hospital, both of which sounded rather useless so I thought I would try a different source. She corroborated the doughy bread story, so later that evening I made sure to swallow the stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner while turning my head in every possible direction in the hopes that it would pick up the bone that had been in there for 48 hours by that point. While it didn't pick up the whole bone, it did manage to snap off a chunk of it, or at least that's what it felt like. There was a hot flash of pain and then suddenly the stabbing during swallowing was less frequent, although not completely gone. I lived with that until I got back to New York and could call a doctor on Thursday.

Friday morning I went to the doctor to get this thing removed! The doctor was really squirrely and quirky, but he was pleasant and quick. First he shot lidocane and some other thing in my nose so it would drip down the back of my throat and numb it. Then he put on his little miner's head lamp and looked down my throat. Next he took a long tweezer/scissor like thing and stuck it down my throat and came back out with the damn bone! It was 3/4" long and at least as big around as a pencil lead. The one side was rather jagged and I suppose that's where it broke off the previous Sunday night. The doctor offered it to me as a souvenier, but I decided that I didn't need to keep it. :) Man, was I glad to have that thing out of there! The doctor then checked the wound for an infection and told me if I didn't develop a fever over the next three days I would be a-ok.

And I was! The end.