Thinking I Was Going to Die After Swallowing a Bone

It was a routine day, going through the motions of studying for the bar exam as a recent law school graduate. My wife had ordered Dominican food the night before, and I got a dish called cerdo guisado, which translated to stewed pork in English.

I bit into a piece of pork, chewed once or twice, and swallowed. Immediately, something was wrong — I swallowed a piece of bone in the bite of pork. It wasn’t a small piece, either — it felt like a 1/2 to 3/4 inch long piece of bone, and it felt unnatural for it to go down my throat. I have accidentally swallowed many a fish bone before, like many, but no piece was ever as big as this piece I just chewed.

My first thought, then, was “am I going to die?” I didn’t feel the bone stuck in my throat, nor did I feel it anywhere in my abdominal area after about five seconds. I drank a lot of water and then ate a couple more bites with no issue, before saving the rest for later.

But I then made the mistake of Googling all the terrible things that could happen after swallowing a chicken or pork bone. The worst was what you could think — death, surgery, permanent damage to your esophagus or intestines. Of course, the vast majority of posts said it would be fine given I was feeling no pain or discomfort and could eat and drink with no interference. My wife also said I would probably be fine if I didn’t feel it stuck in my throat. However, I focused on the worst possible scenarios and wondered whether I needed to go to the doctor or the emergency room for the next 20 to 30 minutes.

I thought about it all day. Because I kept worrying about the bone in my throat, even though I logically knew it wasn’t, my throat felt heavy. I started to have more saliva and swallowed a lot more the more I thought about it. When I stopped thinking about it, my throat didn’t feel heavy anymore, and I didn’t have excess saliva, but it was almost as if the thoughts triggered the physical symptoms.

I did take a nap in the middle of the day shortly after my meal and woke up with no issues. But even this nap did not assuage my fears of thinking there was something seriously wrong because I swallowed this bone. As I kept thinking about it, I kept swallowing very seriously.

There was a very direct correlation. The more I thought about it, the more likely I was to feel like my throat or my stomach was heavy. The less I thought about it, the less I noticed anything.

It has been a week, and I am fine. I stopped thinking about it for the most part and after that first day, I was able to still go about my day even with this thought. I am clearly not going to die, and the bone just went through my digestive system seamlessly.

This was a reminder that my anxiety could still resurface, after a long time where it had laid dormant.

When I was in middle school, I had my first bout with anxiety. It surrounded two basic parts of my body and its functioning: my breath and my stomach.

I was someone I wouldn’t like now when I first started school that year. I had some friends, but my personality was a bit much and more abrasive than it was now. I liked to show off and try to prove I was better than people, like I was the smartest kid in the class or the most athletic person in the school. I played video games, and was, on some occasions, not very nice to the people around me. I was the kind of person who was only friends with someone if they could do something for me.

All of that changed one day, in eighth grade, when my stomach started to make strange noises in class. I was hungry, but it was the end of the school day, and I had about an hour left of my Earth Science class before I could take the bus to go home. At first, my stomach was just letting out somewhat quiet growls, which wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. But as the class went on, the stomach growls got louder and louder.

Since it had never happened like this before, and because so many of my classmates and the teacher were around, I started to freak out about the sound of my stomach growling. No one said anything or even shot a look in my direction, but I was panicking nonetheless. Whether or not they could hear my stomach, to this day, I don’t know.

But that day would mark the beginning of me having flat out panic attacks in the middle of class, particularly in quiet classrooms, always around the noise in my stomach. There was always a social element to this fear — it would be the fear that others would judge me and if they thought I was some kind of freak.

A nexus to this worry about my stomach growling was when I started to become hyperaware of another very natural human function: the sound of my breathing. A few months later, I would start to obsess over whether I was breathing too loudly in the middle of quiet classrooms, especially when we were taking tests.

I would sometimes mention this to classmates I felt comfortable with. I’d ask them if they thought about their breathing a lot too. They normally didn’t, but the moment I mentioned it, then it was hard for them not to pay attention to the sound of their breathing either.

Sometimes, I would notice that other people noticed. I would have a panic attack in the middle of class, and all of a sudden, two or three classmates in my vicinity would also start breathing loudly in class, too, as if my panic attack was contagious. Rationally, it probably meant the sound of my breathing got others focused on the sound of their breathing, too.

Of course, this also had a very social component where I cared too much about what others thought of me.

This cycle would continue for about two years. I was going through puberty at the time, which could explain the sudden onset of all of a sudden caring about what my peers thought when I didn’t before. Even by the time I had started running track and cross country and would have a resting heart rate in the 60s, my heart rate would spike every time I would have one of these full-on panic attacks in the middle of the classroom.

What was wrong with me?

At the time, I looked up everything that could possibly be wrong. The first possible explanation I found on YouTube was Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) when I tried to self-diagnose gastrointestinal issues. I remember I actually asked my doctor about this at some point, but this was ruled out.

I then discovered what anxiety was. In particular, I was going through a pretty bad bout of social anxiety at the time. I browsed forums about how I could fix my problem and yearned for a day when I could no longer have those thoughts and just function like a normal person. It was a very hard thing to explain to others, too.

I discovered cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a therapy that focused on changing negative thought patterns, which seemed like it could be the panacea. However, my parents at the time had no clue what it was and generally just didn’t believe in the idea of mental health or its treatment in general in the early 2010s, so I largely suffered in silence for a few years.

Slowly and gradually, the anxiety around the sound of my stomach or my breathing subsided. I just thought about both a lot less over time as my mind grew more focused on my social, academic, and professional pursuits. Of course, trying to think less about it only made me think about it more when I tried.

The only silver lining from these thoughts is that they made me a more empathetic and far less judgmental person. I started to be the person to advocate being kind to the kid others gossiped about or who was left out. I made big efforts to make others feel included if I sensed that that person could feel like I did, feeling isolated and tormented in quiet rooms. The growling stomach or obsession over breathing were not the only elements of my anxiety at the time, as I did simply overthink a lot of social interactions and wonder what people thought about me too much in all contexts.

The experience with anxiety completely reframed the way I thought and related to others, and one part of caring what others thought meant being more considerate of other people’s feelings.

Ultimately, one form of mental reframing that was greatly helpful to me was thinking “so what?” I came to an internalization that even if my worst fears were true, that my stomach growling was really loud or my breathing was so loud, why would anyone care? And if people did care, why did it matter? It’s not like those thoughts are completely gone today, but I seem to have a lot more emotional resources to deal with them. So much of it was in my head, and there were a lot more important things to tackle and think about in my day.

Swallowing the pork bone was something I thought about for a day, and struggled to stop thinking about. Given my old panic attacks, I realized that I just needed to let myself feel concerned for a period of time, and if it was truly a medical issue, I needed to see the doctor. I realized that this situation was a little different since the bone’s possible adverse effects could potentially pose a medical issue, while the sound of my breathing, especially, was more in my head. But it’s not something I could just snap out of like I wished I could snap out of my anxiety when I was younger.

I continued to swallow often and have a lot of saliva throughout the day, and it frustrated me that I was thinking about it as much as I did when I had to study and take care of other things.

However, I did wake up the next day and attended to my normal life, and the worries about the bone being stuck in my throat were gone.

Back in the day, my panic attacks at the time were so trivial and made no sense, especially when I describe them to others. But dealing with them gave me a lot more tools now to deal with any anxiety-provoking situation, including being able to ask myself “so what?” to be able to brace a situation where even if my worse fears were true, life still goes on.

I also came away from that time knowing the power of time making things better — it passes, forces you to move on, so something I obsess about on one day may not even be on my mind at all the next day. It took a long time, but I built that resilience to beat back my biggest enemy when panic and anxiety loomed large: myself.

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I did finish the cerdo guisado the next day. I did chew more carefully with each bite, and made sure to take an extra precaution to not swallow any more bones. Despite what happened the day before, I finally internalized that, at least in the context of my health, thoughts, and anxiety, everything was going to be okay.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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