Hiccups (3) - Symptoms 1 to 3

As you will see from the above list (Hiccups 1&2) I did try hard to cure my hiccups, and received admirable help and support from my friends and colleagues. But sympathetic though they were, they didn’t fully understand, and I suspect that you don’t either.

You’ve probably had hiccups for half an hour, maybe half a day. You’ve probably found them irritating, found that people laugh at you. But if you have hiccups for 37 days it’s a whole different state of affairs, a different world altogether. ‘Cause the hiccupping, really constant, aggressive hiccupping, stops you sleeping. And it upsets your stomach, your body just doesn’t need the constant juddering, as if your stomach’s rehearsing for an appearance in Alien.

So just to make sure that you get the complete picture I list below the detailed symptoms of long-term hiccupping. The real symptoms, the what-it-does-to-your-life symptoms, let’s just take the humorous seal noise as read.

The Symptoms

Symptom 1. Laughter

The natural reaction to hiccups obviously. After all it’s a funny noise. Every time I went into a shop during this 37-day period the assistant would smile at me as I hiccupped my request. And I must admit I smiled back, even towards the end, when I’d been over a month without sleep, had barely been able to eat, had been thrown out by my girlfriend and lost my job, I couldn’t help but find it funny too, at least not if it was a pretty girl serving me and smiling at me. I’m a sucker for pretty smiles I guess. But if you’re the victim of 37-day hiccups you’re the butt of an awful lot of hiccupping jokes, and it can get a bit repetitive.

Symptom 2. Loss of sleep

As I said before, with my hiccups shaking my body I found it impossible to sleep, it’s like trying to sleep on a roller coaster, it just ain’t going to happen. That first night I lay on my back desperately trying to switch off, trying to stop the hiccups and trying not to wake Nina. I tried counting sheep, not to cure my hiccups but to help me sleep, but the sheep seemed to have hiccups too, which I found distracting. I tried telling myself a story. I know it’s unusual but I can actually make up stories when I’m drifting off to sleep, it helps me relax, and I guess it kick starts the dreams or something. So I tried to think up a story, to let my mind float to a different reality, but that night it didn’t work. I couldn’t stop thinking about hiccups, and there aren’t any stories about hiccups.

After a couple of hours of not sleeping I gave up and went into the kitchen for a glass of milk. Then I read a Terry Pratchett novel for a couple of hours. A signed copy! We’d met him a few weeks before. Nina interviewed him for the student newspaper, and I’d gone along to help, as she’d never done anything like that before.

When we’d got there she was told to wait until after the signing for her interview. So we were kicking around in this bookshop for an hour, we had a microphone and a tape, and a spare tape, and we had a crowd of people who were waiting around too. So I picked up the microphone and went round the queue of Pratchett fans interviewing them about why they liked him, who was there favourite character, what other authors they liked, that sort of thing. I think I did well, considering that at that time I’d never read any of his books. I wrote it up into an article for the student paper. It was good actually, it was fun to do and easy to write, it was just piecing together what other people said, so it was very different from my usual stuff. Having no control over what I wrote, dependent on the random words of strangers.

Unfortunately, what I didn’t anticipate, that by interviewing the crowd in the bookshop I was using up the last of the battery power in the tape recorder. So when Nina finally got to interview the god of humorous science fiction the tape was only recording every other word. So Nina’s great celebrity interview never got written up, and my article got put in instead. This didn’t go down too well I seem to recall.

3. Sickness

As I’ve mentioned before, the constant activity in my stomach as it lurched from hic to hic started to have physical consequences. By day three I was suffering from physical sickness, and was retching up most of the food I ate, not that I felt like eating anyway. As a result of the constant reverberation within I was off my food for most of this period, surviving mainly on water, milk, coffee and occasionally sucking mints.

By this time my colleagues at work had begun to realise that the hiccupping was more than a joke. I hadn’t slept for two nights, so I was bleary eyed, staggering through my work, hiccupping my way through phone calls. Not perfect timing for me, as we were expecting redundancies and, being on a temporary contract, the last thing I wanted to do was stand out, look anything less than 100% alert and efficient.