I've done it again

A long time ago, I all of a sudden couldn't hear out of one of my ears. Turns out, I had something called eustachian tube dysfunction. Who knew there was such a thing? (Besides Caitlin, who, if I remember correctly, had it in both ears around the same time I had it.)

Then again, my ears clogged up and I couldn't hear, but that time, it turned out to be just wax.

Then, you may remember, this last February, I pulled an intercostal which made it really painful to breathe.

And now, to add to my list of strange maladies, last night, I'm pretty sure I pulled my sternohyoid muscle. It was really quite awful and very scary. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you are squeamish.) Right after I put Lillian to bed, I started feeling queasy. No big deal, I just went and assumed my position in the bathroom. What followed was the most frightening vomiting session that I've ever had. I was heaving so badly that I couldn't breathe, and I was starting to panic so I was trying to call Tyler to save me somehow, but I was choking and couldn't call out and couldn't breathe. It was awful.

When it was safely all over, Tyler rushed in to see if I was OK. (I figured out early on that he wasn't ever going to stand and hold my hair back. Ever.) I was shaken but I was OK except for the fact that it felt like I had something stuck in my throat, like a walnut. This was odd as I had had lentil soup for dinner. I drank some water, but it was still there. I ate a popsicle, but it was still there. Then it started hurting. It hurt to swallow. I started think all sorts of things, like my vitamin from the afternoon and somehow lodged itself in my throat. Or that I had accidentally swallowed a walnut and it was coming back to haunt me. As I was attempting to fall asleep, my ideas got crazier and crazier, like I had torn something and I now had a tracheoesophageal fistula and my stomach contents were spilling into my lungs and I was going to get pneumonia or suffocate by morning. Or I'd imagine I could feel my lodged vitamin slip quietly down my throat and into my stomach. I'd test it by swallowing again. Nope, still there. I had dreams of going to the emergency room and the doctor taking forceps and reaching down my throat to pull out all sorts of things: crayons, a mouse, the cursed vitamin. I talked myself out of anything really serious as I could breathe just fine. I also talked myself out of the vitamin/walnut(/mouse/crayon) theory as I could swallow OK, excepting the pain.

As I was eating my cereal this morning, I decided on the pulled muscle. Having consulted my anatomy book, I've decided on the the sternohyoid. It seems to be at the exact place that it hurts.