close call

for a few seconds (milliseconds?) today i thought i was dying.

i had bitten into a sesame ball, or 芝麻球, or zhīma qiú, as an after-lunch dessert, and was chewing away absentmindedly as i began to say something to ulrich. all of a sudden i felt a chunk of sandy lotus paste lodge itself in my throat, and an instant after that, a slightly larger glob of sticky rice dough plunged even deeper down in my throat, in a vague place which in that moment was unknown to me but which i now know, thanks to some cursory searching, must’ve been my trachea. as soon as the larger chunk wedged itself in my chest region i felt its gooeyness expanding, like a thick, membrane-y spider web which was rapidly filling up all of the cavities in my trunk. i felt my eyes start to bulge as a feeling of slowly expanding panic gripped me and pinned me upright in my seat.

i suddenly remembered my mom’s warning last lunar new year, the year of my zodiac symbol the tiger, that one should be careful when eating their celebratory 湯圓, or tang yuan, or rice balls in soup, which are made out of the same hyper-sticky glutinous rice flour as the sesame ball i noshed on today. my mom told me that people have been known to die from choking on tang yuan after slurping at their soup too quickly. “you have to teach Ulrich to chew them slowly,” she said sternly over one FaceTime session. i had giggled at the warning, which reminded me of her lessons about not falling asleep with the ceiling fan on at night (another common source of choking to death, apparently), or going outdoors with wet hair (a sure cause of pneumonia). i am not sure why the first thought which occurred to me in the millisecond of my near-death was a flashback to my mom’s rice ball warning, but a fleeting, “SHE WAS RIGHT!” played before my eyes in all caps for an instant.

after that it was a rapid succession of thoughts all flashing by one after another: “EMERGENCY!”, followed by a decisive “THIS IS IT.”, followed by “wait - is this it?”, and then an image of myself being rushed to the emergency room, but not knowing how i could possibly make it there without first suffocating on the by-now-very-thick-sticky-flour-blockade hanging out in my torso. the whole time i was straining to inhale and in the process i began to emit the loud, extremely laborious sounds of someone hyperventilating. ulrich furrowed his brows and got out of his seat, walked behind me, and then with some hesitation, pounded once firmly on my back. i felt something shift ever-so-slightly in the direction of my lungs, but i still couldn’t get any air in. i managed to rapidly wave one arm towards my back and coughed out, “again!”

the second pound did the trick; i felt the webby blob of dough dislodge from my chest area with a sudden downward “plop”. and then, a welcome rush of air into the lungs. i blinked, i laughed, i jumped out of my chair and wrapped my arms around Ulrich’s sweater-clad belly, a tear edging down the side of my face. alas! the panic had lasted but a fleeting moment, but i still felt dramatically victorious, a rescued damsel clinging to her hero, having managed to narrowly escape death at the hands of that shifty villain, the Sticky Rice Flour.

Photo by Some Tale on Unsplash