Lived Through This
I’ve Had an Imaginary Glob of Peanut Butter in My Throat for 9 Months
Dispatches from the weird world of conversion disorders
I have something stuck in my craw. I’m not speaking figuratively. I’ve had something caught in my throat for nine months now.
It’s not really there. It’s only in my mind. This isn’t just one of those things where doctors dismiss women’s symptoms. My doctors have actually looked.
I’ve had four EKGs, a set of chest X-rays, a cardiac CT, an endoscopy, an ultrasound of my throat that revealed a nodule on my thyroid (mystery solved!), followed by an MRI of my throat that determined the nodule was too small to warrant attention and not anywhere near the lump I feel in my throat anyway (mystery unsolved again—sigh).
Imagine swallowing a giant glob of natural peanut butter — the gritty kind — and it getting stuck in that little hollow where your clavicle bones come together in the front center of your throat (medical name: suprasternal notch). You might reach for a glass of water or swallow hard to try to force it down, but that doesn’t work. Nothing works. The lump just stays there forever, choking you.
The knot first appeared last August. At first, it felt like a tiny bubble in my…
