A third alternative

[Guest guest]

ACHALASIA

About five years ago, sitting at a burger bar waiting for a headache

to go away, I decided to wrap a rather large headache pill into a

small portion of bread and swallow it whole with a wash of coffee.

I think I may have surprised my esophagus because it slammed shut on

the bread and pill combo about halfway down my throat.

It took about three hours to regurgitate the tiny bit of bread and

pill, little softened bits at a time along with whatever saliva I had

swallowed afterwards, which, I believe, helped digest the pill and

the bread.

I was shocked and scared.

The only way I could look at this situation was through Neuro

Linguistic Programming (NLP), a discipline I had been schooled in

some years before which has some foundations in self-hypnosis, so

let's call it self-hypnosis because it's easier.

I emptied my throat by vomiting and, when it was empty, I applied an

NLP technique to unwind the sphincter muscle closing my throat.

After that I found I could carry on eating as normal if I just chewed

my food until it was liquid.

But I had been warned : don't throw food down your throat or it

may

back up or argue with you.

What had happened to me?

I had no idea.

In my mind's eye, I imagined a pocket of flesh that had grown out

of

my esophagus which captured food on its way down to my stomach (this

is not at all what really happens with achalasia, by the way, only

how I imagined what had happened inside my throat), and I thought

that if I could `sew up' or close the pocket somehow using

self-

hypnosis I would be rid of the curse.

So I imagined a tiny spinning machine that could spin threads thinner

and stronger than spider silk or tungsten steel and sent it around

the pocket as fast as possible, cutting it off from any blood vessels

feeding it.

It worked.

But a few months later, it happened again: Maybe I had forgotten the

lesson of chewing my food until I could drink it.

But I couldn't work out why my throat closed up again because I

was

eating `normally'.

Then I realized that I had tried to swallow a rather large mouthful

and my throat just stopped it going down.

Again.

At that stage I had not heard of achalasia or dysphasia; all I knew

was that I couldn't swallow after trying to get large pieces of

food

down my throat.

Lesson: chew your food until it's liquid and then drink it!

I surfed for about twenty years off the Durban Wild Coast in South

Africa and very often I experienced cramps in my legs, cramps that

occurred when I folded a leg up to my back.

The only way to get rid of a leg cramp is to stretch the cramped

muscle in your leg by straightening your leg, which stretches the

muscle.

How do you stretch a throat muscle?

With a balloon.

OK.

Or snip the edge of it and let it unwind.

Or:

Mind over matter.

I call it self-hypnosis, the formal discipline is called NLP or Neuro-

Linguistic Programming.

I just spent five days without food and just enough water to keep me

alive, water that seeped slowly through a very reluctant pin-sized

tube.

I went onto the Internet and found out what this `rare

disease' is

called. Then I found this support group.

Yesterday I remembered the NLP technique I used the first time –

a

super-strong spider web thread of steel that cut off any nutrients to

the `pocket' which was trapping food and, at about three in

the

afternoon, the muscle relaxed and I am now OK.

If anyone would like help on how to use self-hypnosis, email me at

tomdennen@... or go to any NLP site.

The NLP sites, by the way, seem to be pretty far removed from the

originators of NLP itself, Bandler and his partners, so you

might find them a little confusing. But try. It's better than

surgery