Rubin: Help! After 6 days of hiccups, a question: What works for you?

Maybe it's just me, but six days seems like a long time to have the hiccups.

Let's double-check with my wife. My sainted wife, that is.

"The other night," she says, "I almost smothered you with a pillow."

OK, then. Six days — and nights — is probably excessive. But I did what I could, and I'm open to suggestions for next time.

I tried letting a spoonful of sugar slowly dissolve on my tongue. I tried again with peanut butter. I drank water from the wrong side of the glass, which was actually sort of fun. I blew into enough paper bags to fill a Shamu pool toy.

None of it helped. Come to find out, I needed drugs, which makes my version of hiccups a rare subset. That's a good thing, because sometimes instead of a merely annoying gasp and squeak, I had a wrenching spasm in the middle of my chest where I couldn't breathe or swallow for long enough that I started to think how stupid "hiccups" would look in my obituary.

But as for normal, everyday hiccups, I've never been able to squelch those, either. They just smack me around until they get bored and decide to visit someone else. So tell me, please:

What works for you?

Yoga? Acupuncture? Holding your breath? Pinning your chin to your chest, expelling all the air from your lungs, and swallowing three times?

That last one is a dear friend's go-to. He says he shared it with a stranger at an airport once, and the fellow was so grateful he might have bought my friend an airplane if he'd known where to send the check.

It didn't work for me. So, again:

What works for you? Tell me at NARubin@freepress.com.

A long way from a record

Noah Stern’s reliable favorite is simply holding his breath.

“That extra moment beyond where I think I can hold it,” he says, “makes the difference.”

Stern notes that his method is not necessarily better than anyone else’s, and that whatever your standard means of intervention, “if it works for you, it works.”

On the other hand, he’s a physician and the program director for the ear, nose and throat department at the Detroit Medical Center.

He knows the definition of hiccups, that being hyperstimulation of the nerves that control the diaphragm, and he recognizes that acute hypercapnia — excessive carbon dioxide in the blood, often inspired by inadequate respiration — has been shown to smother them.

Sometimes, anyway.

Truth is, he says, bouts of hiccups are rarely severe or extended enough that he sees them in his practice. When they show up, he knows to run down a checklist not limited to medications, trauma along the lines of a car accident or surgery, and an esophageal tumor.

Or, in the case of the most famous man in Anthon, Iowa, falling while attempting to butcher a 350-pound hog.

Charles Osborne emerged from that incident in 1922 with a case of hiccups. He held onto it for a world record 68 years and an estimated 430 million eruptions before it mysteriously stopped in 1990.

Then, 11 months later, he died of ulcer complications. He was 98, so if all those hiccups cost him anything, it wasn’t much.

Finally, a solution

As for my hiccups, they can be traced to a slip-and-fall last month on a golf course near Biloxi, Mississippi.

What I assumed was a sprained ankle turned out to be a break that demanded an aluminum plate and two screws to pacify. While I only needed Advil and stupidity to walk around for awhile on a broken ankle, the surgery required anesthesia — and did you know that can cause hiccups?

Frank Nysowy does, but he sees what's known as intractable hiccups so rarely that he had to call a physician assistant he once trained to remind him of the name of the appropriate pharmaceutical.

Among physician assistants in Michigan, Nysowy is the wise and friendly O.G. He was part of the first P.A. class at Mercy College, almost two decades before Mercy merged with the University of Detroit in 1990, and he recognized the problem immediately when I popped into Michigan Orthopaedic Surgeons on day six to get my cast replaced.

"I'm sure you get rib spasms, right?" he asked.

Yes. Those were the paralyzing squeezes beneath my sternum, all part of having the anesthetic fiddle with one of the nerves on my diaphragm.

Nysowy prescribed a helpful little pill called baclofen. I took two that day, eight hours apart, and by day seven I no longer had to worry about fending off a pillow after dark.

I had, for the record, called the surgical center on the fourth day to ask for advice. Someone there told me to drink lots of water.

I did. Heck, at that point I'd have guzzled motor oil. It had no impact.

What I've learned in this process is that for standard hiccups, I'll take all the advice I can get from you — but if you're looking for help from the surgical center, don't hold your breath.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 6 days of hiccups prompts a call for readers' help — for next time