Sometime in early 2008 I started hearing a gurgling sound in my throat each time I swallowed. I could swallow food, or drink or just saliva and a couple seconds later there's this gurgling sound that could be heard across the room. It was annoying but it didn't really affect me. I didn't change what or how much I ate.
Within a couple weeks of when the gurgling started, I woke up in the middle off the night one Saturday and my heart was pounding. By the time Tammy got me to the ER at the heart hospital by blood pressure was 200/100. Tests indicated I did not have a cardiac event. I started on blood pressure meds (Metoprolol) and left the next day.
When we tried to puzzle out what had happened, Tammy suggested sleep apnea was a possible answer. So I started down that road and over the next several months underwent several sleep studies, tried the CPAP, BiPAP and VPAP machines, hated them all, never could fall asleep with any of them and always ripped off the mask after about 45 minutes max. For now I have untreated central and obstructive sleep apnea.
By late spring, early summer I saw a gastroenterologist, Dr. S., about the gurgling sound. First we did a barium swallow study and that didn't indicate anything. Sometime in the fall I had an upper endoscopy and a dilation. Dr. S. didn't see anything remarkable. Following the dilation the gurgling was either fainter or gone so I didn't think about it much for a while.
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