65 years this never happened to me.
I ate some citrus fruit.
A bit afterwards I started coughing and wheezing. I was coughing and wheezing through the night, even in my sleep.
This morning I was coughing up a storm hoping to hack up a luggie.
Suddenly a rather large citrus seed flew out of my mouth and into the Kleenix.
WTF? I didn’t feel anything stuck in my throat or anything. Where was it?
The coughing and wheezing stopped almost instantly.
You might not physically have felt it but those genius nerves in your throat knew it was there. That tickle to cough was them warning you. “Something is in here, cough @pkbites !”
I’m pretty sure there are little folds and crevices in pharynx and that seed was hiding and irritating a tiny amount. Making you cough.
Your body knew it was there. Amazing, ain’t it?
Yeah, I have had a few patients over the decades who had such acute symptoms after inhaling a bit of food, often things like popcorn and other seed-like material. And it’s not unusual to NOT feel any symptoms in your throat if the foreign body just drops down into the lower trachea or below it.
Glad you coughed it up. Sometimes bronchoscopy is needed to remove such things. Watch out for recurring cough, fever, purulent phlegm, as it could signal a bacterial or inflammatory pneumonia. Not all that likely, but still a possible complication. Contact your doc/ER for signs/sx of respiratory distress.
It might also have been stuck in your tonsils or something.
I had to Google that (I know what phlegm is). That got me on to sputum. Many say “moist” is the most unpleasant word. I nominate “sputum.” Phlegm is up there too. A bit of advice…probably do not want to Google these things.
…characterized by thick, opaque, yellow, green, or brown phlegm, signifies an underlying infection or inflammation, often indicating an increased white blood cell count (neutrophils) in the airway.
Yeah, nice of you to provide, in clear, the description Googling would have given us, after warning us not to Google it. What, no pictures?
You’re welcome. Happy to help.
Would you prefer “laudable pus”?
Whatever you do, don’t click on the link!
I humbly counter-nominate “mucus.”
I have an annoying gap between my back teeth and a late developing wisdom tooth. It’s really difficult to brush or floss and food sometimes gets stuck in there. A few months ago I started to feel some pain from it so I dug around with a sterile needle and managed to pull out a sesame seed. It was 2 weeks since I’d last eaten anything with sesame seeds on and the seed had actually started to sprout in there. Could this be a new gardening opportunity?
I’m going with “lugie” and the act of “hocking up”
Just, ewww.
(Ask me why I hated the Titanic movie)
If the mucus is moist enough you can spit it out as sputum instead of swallowing it.
There: they all fit in one nice sentence. Happy now?
It’s a schooner, right?
