CSSquirrel

I almost died today.

I wish I could say it was due to running into a burning house to rescue a baby or narrowly avoiding tumbling over a cliff in a high speed chase to rescue a sexy woman from a horrible fate.

Instead, I was eating pizza.

Not top quality pizza either. Rather, just cheap, low grade Little Caesar’s pizza.

As my friends and family can attest, I’ve always eaten my meals with a certain amount of speedy gusto. I don’t chew nearly enough before swallowing, and in general I treat the whole endeavor like a race.

No clue why. I’m sure I’ll find a way to blame my parents.

Anyhow, part way through this pizza (unimpressive pizza, I’d like to remind you), I suddenly found myself choking and unable to breathe. This experience isn’t entirely new to me, as I’ve always had asthma and in my younger years my mom got very good at driving to the hospital at a breakneck pace due to asthma attacks.

This time, rather than blaming the callous disregard of my body for itself, I had merely managed to either inhale some food or get it jammed in my esophagus. I don’t really know which, as at the time I was concentrating more on the odd sensation of fighting to stay conscious.

I always figured that when choking on some food, you’ve pretty much got air going neither in nor out of your lungs until you manage to heave up whatever bad casserole you decided to inhale. The odd sensation for me was that I could quite normally breathe out. It was merely the attempt to inhale that was causing me a great deal of difficulty.

You know how when you hold a balloon’s valve mostly shut, and it slowly squawks empty with an indignant squeaky noise?

I felt, and probably sounded, like that balloon.

Somewhere around the 45 second mark I went from concerned attempts at coughing to something approaching panic.

I want to clarify: I was attempting to cough, and failing. Even in my worse asthma attacks I’ve always been able to offer a feeble cough. For whatever reason I couldn’t replicate that endeavor for the life of me. In between attempts at a basic human reflex I was also trying to gasp in air. Just the tiniest, most precious bit of air.

The result felt like sucking hot air out of a car engine through one of those tiny straws used to stir coffee.

When it became apparent that I was not very talented at handling the situation, I stood up at the pizzaria and did that feeble “I’m choking” gesture everyone does in the movies. Gasping, grabbing at my neck, turning purple, etc.

Nobody noticed.

Just going to repeat that. Nobody noticed.

For the record, I recommend anyone who chokes flails around like a comic book villain that just got punched by Batman on a cliff-edge. Apparently it takes a lot to get other people involved.

Things got a little fuzzy at that point, as my head was beginning to swim a bit. But with no help materializing, I decided to try to perform the Heimlich Maneuver on myself. This is not, incidentally, as easy as it sounds.

At some point, my ability to cough finally materialized, and a few moments of hacking later my airways weren’t obstructed.

Hooray me.

Do you get medals for rescuing yourself? No? Damn.

After returning home from this escapade, I came to a few realizations:

1. I’d prefer not to die by choking. Not only would I probably fail to make the papers, but I’d probably have a pretty weak funeral. “If only he’d chewed more.”

2. I’m a good deal less fond of Little Caesar’s all of a sudden.

3. Why was I wasting my morning on pointless tasks! I need to live life to the fullest!

So obviously I need to write a blog post to fulfill #3. I’m not really good at that living life to the max. Do they have instruction guides for that?

Tags: Life, pizza

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.