She hadn’t expected the hiccup fits that started about halfway through her first treatment round. They left her gasping for air and sent pain ricocheting through her already tender body. After they subsided, she felt tired, sore, breathless-as if she’d just finished a tough workout.Īt times, they triggered her gag reflex and made her throw up. They were, Kennedy, now 54, told me, “nothing compared to what we would consider normal hiccups at all.” They lasted for nearly a year. Hiccups are one of the most common bodily experiences that humans (and rats, squirrels, rabbits, cats, dogs, and horses) have even fetuses get them. When we hiccup, the diaphragm involuntarily contracts and the vocal cords snap closed, producing the eponymous “hic” sound. These spasms usually disappear within a few minutes. Compared with cancer’s existential threat and the brutal reality of treating it, hiccups are innocuous, banal, and unserious. But these two experiences are, peculiarly, connected. As many as 40 percent of cancer patients deal with bouts of hiccups during their illness. For a smaller subset-about one in 10-those spells last for more than 48 hours.Ĭhronic hiccups interrupt almost every aspect of life. They disrupt concentration and conversations. Eating, drinking, and swallowing can feel like choking. Often, chest aches linger long after a hiccuping fit subsides.Īnd they are difficult to treat. Doctors have some off-label prescriptions at their disposal, but none has been rigorously tested-none has been proved to work any better than home remedies. Kennedy tried to eradicate her hiccups with deep, forceful inhales and by drinking water from the far rim of a glass she also trained herself to exhale before drinking or eating to limit the amount of air she swallowed. “Sometimes it worked, but most times it didn’t,” she said. Others recruit household items: sugar, lemons, vinegar, a pencil, a cold spoon. Only one hiccup drug has ever been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Hiccups, one of the most basic physiological features of human life, remain deeply mysterious and surprisingly understudied-partly because their fleeting nature makes them hard to examine, partly because they just seem so harmless. Read: The two technologies changing the future of cancer treatment But when they’re not, hiccups confront us with how helpless we can be against our own body’s whims. In popular culture, hiccups are a joke: In a Looney Tunes bit from 1942, Daffy Duck’s hiccups send his hat bouncing. In a 2005 episode of Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, Bloo tries everything to cure his hiccups-he pours a box of sugar into his mouth, breathes into a brown paper bag, drinks hot sauce, eats peanut butter, gets scared, takes small sips and big gulps, stands on his head, brushes his teeth while singing, swallows a lemon. In 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dopey accidentally swallows a bar of soap and starts hiccuping bubbles. In 1970’s Aristocats, Uncle Waldo gets hiccups from drinking too much. In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, a man who’s been hiccuping for 45 years gives this four-second interview to the local Springfield TV news: “Hic-kill me-hic-kill me-hic-kill me.” In 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a hiccuping guard is commanded by the king to get a drink to rid him of his ailment.
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