Tweezer Fetish
About 18 years ago Jenya and I made a lavish salad for dinner using vegetables from our new garden. It was delicious, but afterward my throat was sore and I had an interminable desire to cough. I ate ice cream and gargled salt water – this didn't help. I tried singing for a while, but the soreness only got worse.
I asked Jenya to look if anything was obviously lodged in my throat. She shined a flashlight into my gaping mouth and said, "oh my god there IS something back there."
At that exact second the phone rang. It was my cousin Jonathan on the line. I haven't spoken to him in a while and felt compelled to field the call, trying to maintain a normal conversation while not freaking out about the foreign object in my throat which had just startled my wife.
Meanwhile Jenya ran out to purchase a pair of long tweezers, then deftly plucked the offending item from my tonsil – it was a foxtail. Perhaps I should have washed the salad more carefully.
Nine years later I was telling this exact story at a party. The very next night we were eating take out Chinese food when suddenly I noticed that familiar weird feeling in the back of my throat. And exactly like before Jenya used a flashlight and saw something sticking out from the walls of my gullet AGAIN.
This time however those tweezers weren't long enough, so I ended up waiting in an emergency room for three hours until somebody with better tools could pluck the damn thing out. The doctor performed a successful extraction but we were stumped at first as to the nature of what he retrieved from my gullet. I had a theory and sniffed it. The porky scent confirmed my suspicion: it was a tiny bone shard from a poorly chopped spare rib.