So I’ve been having trouble swallowing food if I don’t chew properly for a while. I guess it’s part of getting older, but last week it morphed into a medical emergency. One mouthful of food got stuck and I actually threw it up. It must have done something in my throat, because the day after I vomited blood and my shit turned black (not just dark, black like ink). Turns out those are two very, very serious symptoms. If you want to get an idea of how frightening this was, write either one of those symptoms (vomiting blood and black excrement) into one of those medical sites that tell you what it could be. Both together are even worse.

And I was aware of how it’s a bad idea to self diagnose, so I called up a line for medical advice from actual medical professionals and then did not calm down when they told me I needed to get myself to a hospital RIGHT NOW. I didn’t need an ambulance or anything, because apart from having vomited blood and having black shit I felt perfectly fine, so I went to the closest emergency room. Then I kept on not calming down after they skipped me ahead of everyone else in the emergency room as soon as they heard my symptoms and immediately started doing every test they had on hand and then had me transported to the largest hospital in the area.

I was pretty much panicking at this point, having been stripped of my clothes and shoved into a hospital bed with like 15 different sensors attached to my body, while doctors showed up to draw blood several times, shove a camera into my ass, take blood pressure, monitor my breathing etc…

And then all the tests they had been doing just started to come back positive. All my blood values were finge, my blood pressure was fine, the camera in the ass said there was nothing to worry about. And nothing changed while they kept me in the bed. Eventually they just told me to not eat any solid food for a while and sent me home while they booked a time to shove a camera all the way down my esophagus into my stomach, and now they’ve done that too and just noticed that it was kind of tight which may cause some trouble with swallowing food, so they widened it during the test.

I must caused some mild bleeding when I originally tried to swallow, which bled into my stomach and then healed on its own before they could see it on their tests. Even with those symptoms which didn’t just frighten me, but apparently mad medical professionals very worried, it turns out I’m just… fine? The feeling of relief is almost as powerful a drug as whatever they pumped into my system when they were shoving that camera down my throat, except I can read and write and form new memories now, and OK it’s not quite as powerful a drug.