Lately I’ve been very afraid of choking. I don’t know what it is; my anxiety has a strange way of manifesting itself. Last month, it was anaphylactic shock. This month, choking.
I do have a long history of choking on things. I can remember my grandfather holding me over the laundry room sink when I was four, slamming on my back after I had swallowed a penny. When I was six, I got so excited about my sister’s new Barbie that I inhaled my Jolly Rancher.
As an adult, I’ve been administered the Heimlich maneuver twice. The first time was during a quiet Easter dinner at my grandmother’s house, when I suddenly began to choke on my honey-baked ham. My eyes darted around the table at each of my helpless family members while I flapped my hands and made the universal hand sign for choking, until my oldest sister’s Hulk-like boyfriend, Ryan, lifted me out of my chair and saved my life.
The second time was during a friend’s wedding reception. Filet mignon. This time, it was my sister’s new boyfriend, John (not so Hulk-like), who had to reverse-bear hug me until I could breathe again. After I thanked John and sat back down, the waiters made a fuss and asked the guest whose plate I had spit my steak onto if she wanted another dish. Traumatized, she said no.
Knock on wood, I haven’t choked on any of my food since then, but trust me, there have been many close calls. I’d like to put it out there that it is very dangerous to eat Ritz crackers when your mouth is too dry, as well as powdered donuts and anything else crumbly. I’ve had some scary experiences with peppermint candies too, so now I suck them down to the size of petite peas, and even then I make it a point to crunch them into tiny pieces before letting them slide down my throat. And of course I cut my vitamins in half—those things are fucking huge! I also no longer eat pennies.
Honestly, I don’t think we humans are spending enough time worrying about choking. We all eat at least two or three meals a day, right? Not counting snacks and late-night shame eating. So that’s, like, a thousand meals per year, give or take. And if we heed the advice of health experts and take twenty minutes to eat every meal (I’ve Googled this), then for three hundred and twenty hours a year we have hunks of food bouncing around in our mouths, dangerously close to our windpipes.
I think we should all just take a minute to think about that.
And there are a lot of people who do die of choking. About five thousand Americans every year, in fact, including many people who matter, like the baseball player, Jimmie Foxx, who died from choking only a year after his own wife choked to death on her Chinese food. In 1956, big band musician Tommy Dorsey’s sleeping pills left him so sedated after eating a heavy dinner that he choked in his sleep. And Atilla the Hun, the fearless ruler of a massive tribal empire? He was forty-seven.
Tennessee Williams was seventy-one when he died in his room at the Hotel Elysée on the Upper East Side. According to the New York City chief medical examiner, the playwright “choked to death on a plastic cap of the type used on bottles of nasal spray or eye solution.”
What the actual fuck.
Williams’s former assistant has since gone on the record to say that this was a total untruth, that he really died of Acute Seconal intolerance—Williams struggled with drug and alcohol abuse—and that the medical examiner only wanted to make the story sensational because Williams was a big gay celebrity and all of that. But, I’m sorry, that’s a really specific fabrication.
I guess what I really want to know is, can anyone out there assure me, without the shadow of a doubt, that midway through swallowing I won’t decide to just take a break and let the pretzel sit in my throat and kill me? Or how about this: Can one actually will his esophagus to close up? And what happens if, after typing this very sentence, I decide to dislodge the shift key from my keyboard and just shove it down my throat?
I honestly think that these are legitimate concerns.
It will comfort you to know that I do experience moments of reprieve when I’m worrying about choking, when I’m able to talk myself down a little bit. For example, say I can’t fall asleep because I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that a lot of people choke on their pillowcases while they’re sleeping. Well, sometimes, after crying silently for a few minutes while my husband sleeps soundly next to me, I’ll say to myself, OK, Ben, fine, you’re going to die from choking, and yes, it’s going to be nothing short of horrific (wasn’t it Blanche DuBois who said “funerals are pretty compared to deaths?”), but it’ll also be rather quick—about four minutes, says Google. And really, what is four minutes compared to a day, a year, a century? It’s but a blip.
So, perhaps I would suffer unimaginably, but I would be dead before long, and then there would be blackness or light or whatever, and I could just put it all behind me.
You see, folks, at the end of the day, all I really want is to enjoy binge eating again. I want to be able to dunk my face into a pint of ice cream and not fear Chubby Hubby being listed as my cause of death, or mindlessly gobble Cheetos at three in the morning without imagining my husband tripping over my dead body on his way to the bathroom.
But this is what my life has come to: counting my chews, chugging copious amounts of water between precious little bites, avoiding restaurants where CPR instructions aren’t taped up where everyone can see them.
I know that over time my menacing brain will prefer that I obsess about something else, like botulism or the Ebola virus or botflies nesting in my skull.
But until then.
Choking.

Ben Appel is a rising senior majoring in creative writing at The School of General Studies. Quarto published his essay, “How to Be Cisgender,” online in January 2018. Visit him at benappelwrites.com, and on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.