I Can Handle An Emergency (Even When it's Not Yet an Emergency)

[sroni]

 
So, this afternoon we went to a Chinese restaurant and it was lovely. But I wound up kind of choking on some food. I say “kind of choking” because I could still breathe. I could feel myself wanting to freak out, but I forced my throat to remain relaxed and I kept breathing. I tried to kind of work the food back up, because it really hadn’t gone very far, but it wouldn’t move. I tried swallowing it the rest of the way, and that just made it worse. At this point, it was beginning to get difficult to breathe, so I tried to cough it up and wound up gagging it up instead. I’d already thought through what I was going to do if this failed (signal to Spouse, who was sitting right next to me, and if that failed, use the chair to give myself the Heimlich; I know how but I really don’t want to do that if I don’t have to because it hurts). Luckily, the cough/gag worked.

It was odd, because people expect me to not handle things well in an emergency, but so far, every emergency I’ve had, I’ve remained fairly calm and collected each time.

Comments

[sroni.livejournal.com]

If I honestly couldn't breathe, I might have started to panic (started, and I'm pretty sure that I still would have been mostly calm, just panicky-in-comparison to how calm I stayed this time), but I've had plenty of times that I had difficulty breathing because of something getting a little stuck. So I already knew that if I keep calm and focus on breathing slowly through my nose that it works a lot better than freaking out. This was the time it was most difficult for me to actually get the food out, but honestly, the people around me freaked out more once they'd figured out what was going on. :P