It's 3:30am and my son is up, crying his little eyes out. Usually I can rock him back to sleep in ten minutes, but that night, he wasn't having it. He had been fighting a cold, and wanted the extra cuddles. Well, the clock went from 3:30am to 5:30 am, and the little rascal was still awake. As a singer, getting your child's cold is a no no and I always try to prevent it by swallowing garlic. This has worked for me in the past, and is something that was passed on to me as a child, by my darling father. So here it is, 5:30 am and I am exhausted. No sleep, and being around someone with cold, is a recipe for disaster. So, I said 'okay Amari, you're going to have to cry yourself to sleep,' so I put him in the cot, went downstairs, peeled a clove of garlic, grabbed some water, looked at the massive clove, thought 'this is big you should squash it like usual,' decided I was too tired, and then swallowed it. Wrong choice! The garlic got stuck half way down my throat and I started choking. It was pushing against my wind pipe, but not inside my windpipe, thank God, so I was able to breathe out of my nose. Regardless, of still being able to breathe, I was scared, and in pain.
I ran upstairs to tell my sleeping husband I was choking, and with great effort, he tried to dislodge the piece of garlic with the heimlich manoeuvre, and then my hitting my back extremely hard. Nothing was working and I was coughing up blood, so he called the paramedics. The paramedics showed up about 20 minutes later and after another failed attempt at trying to get the garlic out of my burning throat, they called the ambulance. After what seemed to be a lifetime (40 min), the ambulance came, and took me to the hospital. I started to vomit in the ambulance, but the garlic would not budge. I could not swallow anything, not even my own saliva. I had to continuesly spit in a bowl, which was absolutely disgusting. My mouth, and throat were so dry, I couldn't help but continue to cry in frustration. I was tired, sick, in pain and fearful that I had wrecked my throat and my career. What would I do if I couldn't sing anymore?
Once I got to the hospital, the staff just left me alone. I was doubled over in agony, and no one asked me if I was okay or needed anything. I had to actively get someone to help. Finally they hooked me up to an IV, and called a doctor in to see me. If I hadn't said anything, I would have been sitting there with no help for hours. It was like, I didn't exist. I am never going that hospital again ;)
The doctor took me to get an X-ray of my throat, and after seeing how big the garlic was, he wasn't sure their first method of trying to dislodge the garlic was going to work. In preparation, he called the ENT doctors to standby for surgery. I was thinking, 'Can't you guys just stick a long tube or claw down my throat and just suck or pull it out...geez!
After what seemed like a lifetime, the doctor finally injected me with a drug to relax all my muscles. Twenty minutes later I was throwing up, and thinking 'this is not working, I am in so much pain, my throat is burning and this stupid Allium Sativum is not moving. However, I was wrong. My muscles had relaxed, and the garlic was sliding down my oesophagus. I could finally swallow painfully through the inflammation. The crazy part was that I was more scared of losing my voice than anything. Maybe because I knew I was going to survive, but the thought of not being able to sing again was devastating.
Needless to say, I am fine and laughing about it now. It took me less than a week to recover, and yes I have had garlic since, but only ground up in someone else's cooking.
