I must confess, I eat fast. I annoy Tippy all the time since I usually finish my meal well ahead of schedule. I’m not sure why I like to eat fast, maybe I find that the flavors intensify as the speed of ingestion goes up. I even eat really rich desserts fast.
On this particular day, I was dining on some salmon that we grilled. The fillets contained some little bones that I shrugged off and ate–bad move. One of the bones got lodged near my uvula. I didn’t choke, but was simply annoyed. At first, I just tried hacking it up, or just swallowing it, without success.
The bone had somehow lodged itself horizontally across my uvula. It was a weird feeling having something touch my uvula and knowing about it. It’s not everyday that someone bumps into your uvula and you know about it.
In any case, I had the worst time trying to get the bone out, since I have a huge gag reflex (just ask my childhood dentist, he probably still has nightmares about me to this day). I looked up some remedies online, and got a few suggestions:
- Drink lots of water.
- Eat lots of bread or rice without chewing.
- Hold lemon juice or vinegar in your mouth.
- Have a trustworth friend use tweezers to carefully dislodge the bone.
- Learn Buddhist meditation techniques to will the bone out. Basically, learn how to control the muscles near the uvula, which you probably never had to consciously use.
- Don’t do a damn thing. Just wait till the bone naturally comes out.
I had already tried (1) and (2) to no success. For (3), I tried putting some fish bones in vinegar, and didn’t see them dissolve. (5) intrigued me, and I tried really hard to get it out–no luck. I was surely not going to do (6), the bone was very irritating, and I had Tippy try to get it out with some chop sticks, but I gagged to easily.
Finally, I got the bone out using a mirror and a single chop stick.
Not a pleasant evening…