Yesterday I'm eating lunch with my wife and 4 yr. old son at one of our favorite Mexican food places. I'm having a chicken burrito smothered in green chili and I'm seriously hungry. My wife runs out to the car to get something and I'm eating too fast and promptly get a chunk of chicken lodged in my throat and start to choke. Now this is a really creepy feeling, not being able to breath at all and it's the first time it's ever happened to me. I can see where people would panic when this happens to them but my training kicks in and I don't. By training I mean both the centered calmness of MA and my paramedic/ERT training. So I'm sitting there thinking I'm choking, my wife's out at the car, I'm on the patio by myself with my kid and I've got to deal with this. So I look around and find a corner on a waist high pillar and plan to do a self-Heimlik. Then it comes to me, the idea that the explosive breath used when kicking may just fix this whole thing. So I focus and "DEK" - the chunk of chicken launches across the patio. By this time my wife had spotted me and was making a mead dash through the restaurant which brings the staff running as well. I'm catching my breath and thanking G_d for my training that just may have saved my life in a way that I never imagined. Because of it I was able to think and over rule any instinctual response. So stick with your training and never walk away from an opportunity to learn more. Someday you will be in a fight, though maybe not the one you think of in terms of MA, and your training will give you the tools to win.

Holy shizzle! Glad to hear that you were able to handle the situation. That takes extraordinary control to remain calm like that. Kudos!

Whoa! In all honesty, I don't know if I would have been able to think it through nearly as well. Now having heard your experience, I am sure I will in the future if it happens to me, thanks to this.

Glad you are still with us and able to share this experience.

Scottie

Great example of reaching your interself and denying the notion to panic because you couldn't breath. Its more then phyiscal its mental also.

Some people talk it, others walk it and talk it. Its good that you used your training to avoid a potential life threaten situation. Not to mentioned that you avoid tramatizing your child and wife, though she might have still been a little scared.

It's a nice story, but the skeptic in me wants to know why a trained paramedic/ERT doesn't know how to spell 'Heimlich'.

Also, how were you able to expel the lodged food with a Kihap? When I'm eating, I generally don't take a deep breath before taking a bite. Plus, you say you weren't able to breathe in?

That's just me. I'm confused.

I woke up choking on my own vomit after a drunken night out when I was younger, I managed to clear the blockage with a big burp!. This caused a lump of 'matter' to shoot up into my sinus and block it
After a couple of days it hadnt budged naturaly, so I 'snorted' a condom up through the effected nostril so it came out at the back of my throat and then 'flossed' my sinus and it worked like a charm

The irony is that if I hadnt been such a big drinker, I would not have been in such a predicament, yet if I hadnt been a big drinker, I would never have learned the trick with the condom either. Yin and Yang baby, Yin and Yang

*note to self - never party with Cord

Or be eating while he's telling one of his stories, that start with I was drunk and ends with the use of a condom.

That was some good Goulash, but never More. Here it goes to the trash can.

Thanks Cord, I didn't need to finish that anyway.