Late Night Throat Thickness & Chronic Ear Ache

A couple of months ago I was plagued by a rather unusual and uncomfortable feeling. Every night just before I fell asleep I would get this awful sensation of "thickness" in my throat. It felt almost as if I had swallowed an entire bag of overstuffed cotton balls. It was really weird because I would only encounter this swollen throat feeling in the middle of the night. I was just starting to learn to live with the odd feeling when something even worse started to accompany it. My ears started aching something awful and it soon got so bad until I was almost in tears every night.

The only way that I could sleep was by downing two Tylenol PM. These two extremely uncomfortable situations eventually got the better of me so I made a visit to my doctor to find out what in the world could be wrong. After I described the pain my doctor told me that she had a pretty good idea of what was ailing me. She looked into my ears and throat for good measure and when she didn't find any indication of infection she was assured that her initial theory was correct. She told me that it sounded a lot like two major symptoms of a less common form of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD). What? How in the world could I have any form of acid reflux disease? I had always associated GERD with severe heartburn. I'd never experienced heartburn a day in my life, even through two pregnancies.

How does a person just skip right through heartburn and go straight to acid reflux? I almost fell out of my chair. I shard my questions with the good doctor so she went on to give me a valuable lesson. Here's what I learned. First of all, that feeling of "throat thickness" actually has a name; it's called globus pharyngis. Apparently, when this globus pharyngis is paired with chronic ear ache the culprit is usually Laryngopharyngeal Reflux Disease (LRD). She explained to me that LRD occurs when the stomach acid backflows and actually reaches the back of the throat. Most people don't recognize that it is a form of acid reflux disease or GERD because it often presents without the familiar sensation of heartburn. Basically, LRD is GERD one step further...the acid has gone past the stomach and into the throat. Also, a chronic ear ache (without the presence of an obvious culprit like an ear infection or obstruction) is a classic sign of both forms of acid reflux. Who would have thought such a thing?

To make a long story a bit more short, my doctor prescribed a proton pump inhibitor and gave me a long list of foods that I should avoid. The food list was a hard thing to swallow because I had lived forty long years eating nothing but spicy food and at the top of the list was all things spicy. I must have been sucking on hot sauce ever since I started eating solid foods. I'm the girl who carries Tabasco around in her purse, how was I ever going to live without it? Just about everything else that I loved was on the list too -- garlic, onions, tomatoes, anything acidic, and basically everything strong in flavor. I could have cried, this woman must be crazy I thought. I started taking the medicine and eating bland foods and I found that my ear ache and globus pharyngis (what a cool new term to know) eventuall all but disappeared. I started feeling good and I soon forgot about my painful, sleepless nights. In fact, I started feeling so good until I decided that maybe this doctor was wrong about the spicy food thing. I just couldn't believe that I had to give up one of my biggest passions. I thought that maybe I could eat just a little bit of something spicy and I'd probably be alright. It just didn't make sense to me that I would all of a sudden be unable to eat spicy food after eating it for so long. After all, doctors don't know everything, right?

So, I moseyed on down to the local Chinese restaurant and filled up on just what I'd been craving for off of their buffet; black pepper shrimp (made extra spicy by my addition of the cayenne pepper sauce) topped with stir fried onions, hot buffalo wings, and garlic string beans. The food was sooo good until I saw heaven upon the first bite! Afterwards I didn't feel any pain and I eventually fell asleep fully satisfied and thoroughly happy that my bland food ordeal was finally over. Yeah, then IT happened....that night I woke up out of my sleep to the most awful ear ache and severe throat thickening feeling ever! It felt like there was a fire deep inside my inner ears and my throat was literally pulsing with rushes of pain. I reached for my prescription medicine and chased it with Tylenol PM. About forty-five minutes later as the tears finally slowed down from a relentless flow and the pain slowly ebbed into a dull, constant throb I knew that my doctor was right and I had to say a bitter goodbye to my love of spicy food. I don't know how I'll ever get through the trial of bland food but I do know that I don't ever want to feel that level of pain again...and I'll do whatever it takes to make sure that I won't.