[Jeb writes… ] I had just sat down with the family and Dad to a spaghetti dinner. [We lived at Livsey for a month between moves. Kathy was 7 months pregnant.] Mom was in Tampa with her friends. About my fifth bite, I felt a piece of French bread get caught in my throat. I immediately realized that it was stuck, so I went to the upstairs bedroom to try to cough it up or swallow it down.
My eyes started tearing up. I felt on the verge of throwing up or choking. Terrible feeling. My stomach tried throwing up, and my throat tried swallowing, but nothing was coming up and nothing was going down. My esophagus was sealed tight.
The problem with this condition is that you fill up with saliva that starts spilling into your wind pipe. Even though I knew what was happening, my body was panicking. It didn’t know whether I was going to gag or vomit, and neither reaction seemed to help.