Uvular Discontent...

...I woke up this morning and I had a ridiculous pain in my throat. As mentioned in the post below, I am just now recovering from a touch of the 'ol Pork Flu and I was REALLY hoping that this pain in my neck wasn't another round of that nonsense. I tried to swallow some spit and I shit you not, I thought someone had crept into my room and crammed an injured badger down my throat and at some point that badger shit out a broken light bulb...and then I gagged...and gagged again. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I tried to clear my throat (read "hock up phlegm") just like I do every morning and the badger shat another light bulb and I felt the weirdest sensation. It was like a part of my tonsils had come away from the back of throat and stuck itself to the back of my tongue. I quickly looked into the mirror to see what it was and to my dismay, my uvula had swollen to about the size of a ping-pong paddle. I couldn't talk. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breath heavily. None of this without gagging. I must have sounded pitiful to my wife, who was still sleeping at the time....like I had decided today was as good a day as any to give bulimia a real sportin' try.

It was awful. I quickly took some ibuprofen and drank some water in an attempt to get it to un-swell. Then I went downstairs to do what any hypochondriac would do...search the Internet for the most ominous cause of my symptom. From all indications the problem I was experiencing was quite the dangerous situation. There were warnings that such a condition could lead to death by asphyxiation if not treated immediately and that the mortality rate was VERY high for infants and adults alike. This wasn't good. And each individual entry warned against the same fate. I was starting to get a little nervous. However, until that point I had forgotten what that little thing in the back of one's throat was called and had been referring to it as my "epiglottis" during all of the searches...which happens to be the curtain across one's airway. And apparently, that's quite the predicament. After remembering that it was NOT the epiglottis and was instead the uvula, I re-researched and came across numerous posts about how everyone experiences this type of thing at least once in their life and it may be from numerous causes...all very innocuous. You see, this is an example of why a shrink once told me not to do this type of thing. For starters, all of one's symptoms can lead back to some fatal issue (which I tend to hone in on like a smartbomb). I mean, a pain in my knee cap can be traced back to both me banging it on the coffee table BUT IT ALSO COULD MEAN TENDON CANCER...!!!! You see where that leads? Second, and more importantly in this case, I'm not fucking smart enough to even do the right search in the first place. I mean, if I have a nose bleed, the causation search results will be MUCH easier on the mind than if I mistakenly do a search for ANAL bleeding. It certainly helps to get these things right...especially when you're manic and gagging.

Well, I started to go through the potential causes. I didn't have strep throat due to the fact that I had been on Z-pack for the past 4 days and I figured that any bacterial infection that would have tried to get a foothold would have been exterminated long ago. It wasn't caused by snoring, either. Now, I snore with the best of them. In fact, if I have a couple beers and fall asleep on my back, Shanna may as well have fallen asleep next to a running chainsaw. But my wife also isn't afraid to hurt me immediately when the snoring starts. This elbow to the ribs or brisk shake of my head normally wakes me up enough for her to tell me to move to my side. So unless she put up with it all night (no way) there isn't a chance that I snored long enough to turn my uvula into the pink golf ball it had become. Much to my dismay, the only one of the listed causes that made a modicum of sense was "excessive breathing through the mouth". That's not an ego booster.

Eventually the Motrin kicked in and my throat went back to its normal size. And then I came to a very sobering realization. I'm such an obnoxious, cro-magnon mouth-breather that I actually cause myself INJURY while I sleep. It's like a teeth-grinder waking up one day having reduced his canines to zipper teeth. Not sexy at all.

Thank Jeebus that I'm married, cause I don't see this particular personality trait playing well on Match.com.