There’s a question doing the rounds at the moment, “Have you ever laughed until you cried?”

You know the phrase, when something “goes down the wrong way”? When, instead of going down your gullet (talking technical here!), a morsel of food will accidentally get caught in your windpipe (see?). If you want to let me know the names, leave a comment.

It’s normally followed by a bout of heavy coughing to displace the food. The coughs force you to breathe out, and if the coughs are heavy and frequent enough, you end up all breathing out, and no breathing in, so with no air in your lungs, you start to choke/suffocate.

You see that frequently in stroke sufferers. Whatever valve controls that gullet / windpipe split, it doesn’t work properly. In fact, in the UK that is (used to be) used by hospitals as a layman’s test for a stroke – they’d give you some food to eat and see if you had a problem swallowing. Once back at home, I found it could be triggered by breaking into laughter and having food in my mouth at the same time.

That has happened to me. Dare I say it, quite a bit? Certainly, more often than before I had the stroke. At the time, it is scary. As in, one second you’re laughing at something, the next you’re dying. Thankfully, it does appear to heal somewhat with the passage of time. I’m now ten years downstream from the stroke and it hardly ever occurs.

But the moral of the story is, if you’ve had a stroke, don’t watch comedy shows at the same time as eating your supper!