4

She Is Always, Always Hiccuping

cyano66/iStock

Rachel's hiccups never stop -- not even when she sleeps. It's been rough: "I used to wake up every two hours or so, and then it would take me anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep again." The good news is that she's "mastered the art of sleeping through them," meaning she usually achieves a sterling six to seven hours of sleep out of the nine she allots herself every night, with only three or four very rude awakenings. The bad news is that it's probably making the hiccups worse.

coombesy/Pixabay
A hiccup/snore combo can't be doing any favors for any neighbors trying to sleep, either.

"Nobody's quite sure why fatigue and insomnia cause hiccups, mostly because sleep is still poorly understood on a physical level. But it's thought to have something to do with the way the nerves connect in the brain."

The waking world isn't much better. "I don't talk much anymore, because the hiccups interrupt me mid-sentence. When it's someone I know, I ignore the hiccup and keep on rolling, because they can fill in the blank themselves. If it's someone I don't know well, I backtrack and start the whole sentence over again. My little cousin, who just turned six, freaked out over the noises when he met me for the first time. He kept looking around, trying to figure out where it was coming from. They scare him -- he won't come within three feet of me."

3

Hiccup Fetishes Are Shockingly Common

Google

Of course hiccup fetishes are a thing. "Before I ever went to the doctor," Rachel says, "I Googled around to see what I could find, and one of [the websites I found was] hiccupforum.com. I thought it was for people who had hiccups and clicked, and then I found out it was a fetish site. They date back far enough that they were originally a Yahoo group."

After a few months, she had forgotten about her brief foray into respiratory kinks ... until she signed up for a dating website. "I mentioned the hiccups as a 'Ha-ha-isn't-this-funny' type of thing" ... And she severely and immediately regretted it. "One guy told me his 'magical cum' was going to cure my hiccups. Someone else said it would be hot if my hiccups kept going during blowjobs or sex. Still another said he wanted to have sex because the hiccups would make my pussy get really tight."

yacobchuk/iStock
"I'm just a stock photo model pretending to be a doctor, but I'm still
confident in saying that is complete bullshit, medically speaking."

2

None Of The Conventional Treatments For Hiccups Work

frolic somepl/Pixabay

Rachel gave traditional medicine a go when it became clear that drinking from an upside-down glass for a few months wasn't working. When doctors could find nothing physically wrong with her, they loaded her up on psychiatric meds. "Thorazine knocked me out, to the point where I slept through my twin sister's college graduation," she says. "But I wasn't hiccuping while I was asleep, so it did its job!"

lzf/iStock
Less helpful if you're trying not to hiccup while driving.

1

The Less Conventional Cures Are Bizarre And Untested

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Remember all that talk about the vagus nerve earlier? Rachel explains with a much better analogy than we could come up with: "A nerve is essentially a long wire. Electricity comes in one end when you flick the light switch and flows out to power a light. The light goes off when the electricity stops. Sometimes, a flickering light is because of a problem in the switch (the brain), the wire (the nerve), or the light itself (the diaphragm). The psych meds work by fixing the problem at the switch, and the muscle relaxants work by fixing the problem at the light. But what if the problem is in the wire? That's why so many 'cures' focus on swallowing -- drinking water fast, eating a teaspoon of sugar, and gargling saltwater all trick the nerve into 'resetting' itself."

Couleur/Pixabay
We suggest an enormous piece of cake. Probably won't work, but you'll feel generally better about things.

An increasingly desperate Rachel tried all of that and more. Nothing worked. But the vagus nerve also has a dirty side.

"The vagus nerve controls more than the diaphragm -- it runs from the mouth all the way down to your ass," Rachel explains. That means, if you've run out of things to swallow, "a digital rectal massage [aka fingering your ass] can also reset the nerve. Another weird cure is an orgasm."

gemenacom/iStock
Ideally without any of the dudes from back in entry three.

You have our full permission to explain away your browser history by insisting that you had the hiccups, but sadly, neither of those remedies worked for Rachel. But there may be hope yet: "On the surgical side, implanting a vagus nerve stimulator has been tried, and it was successful."

Cyberonics
As well as treating pretty much any damn thing you can think of.

So all she's gotta do is walk into a hospital and ask for one surgery, please. What's holding her back? Fear that her OKCupid hit rate will fall? "The surgery's experimental, so insurance won't cover it," she explains. There's also the added complication that "none of my doctors really know anything about it." So now she has to wait on the FDA's famously speedy approval process, find a pot of gold, and then hope that her surgeon's good at "wingin' it."

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