David Chiu

This morning while at my desk I started taking my daily multi-vitamins. It’s a pack of 7 pills 4 of them which are huge. Since I’ve been taken them for a while I’ve been comfortable swalling 2-3 at a time. Well this morning when I tried to swallow three pills at once, one went down sideways in my throat and got stuck. I started to choke and told myself to calm down and just drink some water. That didn’t help. I started to choke a little more and now I started to freak out. My breathing became shallow because of the obstruction in my throat and the next thought that came to mind was “Heimlich Manuever”. I realized that at this point I needed someone to perform the heimlich manuever on me fast. So I turned around to my cube mate, tapped him on the shoulder and through a very raspy voice said, “do you know the heimlich mavuever? Unfortunately my cube mate isn’t the most fluent in English and he kinda just looked at me. So I got up from my chair and started to look around the room for someone whom I thought might know what I was talking about. I chose James, a new guy who recently joined the company. I remember him telling me that he had participated in 2 triathalons and so I figured he probably could help. I walked over to him, trying to control my choking and barely got out the words “do you know the heimlich mavuever?” He responded ” yes” and jumped to his feet to help. After a few jerks to my upper abs the pill became free and I swallowed it.

Lesson: Vitamins CAN be dangerous!