First Ack

I sat all the way through the advanced first aid training classes without batting an eye. I got up early, drove my sleepy butt all the way downtown through traffic to the academy and found the property appointed spot before the crack of dawn with out incident.
The boring training films were dry and out dated, but I did not nod off. I sat next to a woman with a highly contagious cold and a hard of hearing man who repeated, "What did he just say?", so often I actually only heard every forth sentence. By the end of my sessions I myself resembled a wheezy parrot. Locking lips with a plastic chick who's first name is all I ever learned, (Annie or Anny? is it eh?) didn't ruffle me, nor did rolling around on a dirty floor with sixty strangers. Hell, even the picture montage of gory body pieces the EMS guys brought with, the one of motorcycle vrs car and dude's leg bones pointed in different directions after an explosion didn't faze me a bit. I can now tourniquet a coat rack protruding from your abdomen and differentiate a stroke and a heart attack. If you set yourself on fire or get sung by a bee, I'm good. I can even throw you up over my shoulders and run with you if I decide I must. I just can't swallow.
During the choking segment of training, our teacher just happened to mention the aging population is prone to choking. This is due the the weakening of throat muscles and the gag reflex slowing. This thought totally blew me away.
I am excepting my aging reluctantly. I know I have only more maintenance on my body to look forward to every year. Stiffening joints, osteoporosis, memory loss, I know is expected of me. But the inability to swallow? Please God no.
I spent the rest of the day during breaks in classes at the vending machines testing this lax throat muscle theory.
Nothing happened, other than gas from all the junk I consumed. (I'd whisper to the others in my group when the hard of hearing man's back was turned,"Oh man, does this guy reek!")
But the image of me losing control of one of my two favorite entrance muscles stuck with me.
The very next morning I was in my own kitchen, scarfing down an apple in my attempt to detox my body of the unhealthy chemicals I had binged on the previous day when part of the skin momentarily caught in my throat. I immediately began hacking like a cat coughing up a fur ball. I found myself doing this repeatedly through out the day.
"What is wrong with you?", my family asks every time I began to hork. How could I explain that I have gone all *Margaret Brown on them and it was the beginning of my demise.
Thing is so far it is only slight. I do not lose my breath and turn blue in the face, but I feel food hanging out mid way to my belly. This upsets my self reasoning greatly. Good food should never projectile out of me. The hypochondriac in my has come up with a very lady like hiccup do dislodge any suspended food particles.
"You do have the hiccups very often", my dinner companions will remark. I smile all coy and pat my napkin over my mouth and hork again for good measure, as I nod and look away. I do not eat other meals any longer in public. I had to pull over on the side of the road the other day to re chew the imaginary granola bar wedge that was breakfast.
Yogurt is my new best friend. Except when I forget it is yogurt and I shoot it out my nose.

*Up north when I was young and could swallow successfully I worked in a bakery. Margaret Brown was an elderly woman who would come in during the summer, a coat covering her dowers hump, wearing a scarf, and gloves. She claimed air conditioners upset her system. She always had a lemon bar because she found them refreshing. She did not come in for her coffee once for a week. When I asked her why see told me she had stepped on an electric cord in her apartment and it had upset her system bad. She did have the good sense not to sit on the same side of the room as Old Smeller, the grizzly bachelor who only dressed in bib overhauls and bathed yearly, maybe. I now wish I had been kinder to that crazy old bat.