Medical problem drives teen out of school; thoughts of suicide

Hiccups!

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/02/14/Tampabay/Hiccups_defy_remedies.shtml (via the Obscure Store)

...none of those home remedies has helped 15-year-old Jennifer Mee, who started hiccupping three weeks ago and hasn’t stopped.

Something like 50 times a minute, she hiccups, a staccato sensation that resembles a smoke alarm with a dying battery. Her mother, Rachel Robidoux , thinks Jennifer sounds like a barking chihuahua.

It was kind of funny at first, but now it’s become much more than an annoyance.

“It’s actually really stressful,’’ Jennifer said. “Really, there’s nothing much I can do except stay home.”
...
The longest case on record lasted 69 years and five months. Sufferer Charles Osborne of Iowa married twice, had eight children and lived into his 90s, all while hiccuping every 11/2 seconds.
...
Her chest and hips hurt, sore from the constant spasms. She is cautious when showering; she doesn’t want to inhale water and choke. She eats foods like applesauce, Jell-O and ice cream, things she can swallow quickly between hiccups.

She tried to go back to school the day after her bout began, but was sent home. Tutors now come to her house.

She has had little contact with friends. She doesn’t go out much, and Robidoux said her daughter worries that the hiccups will persist so long that no one will want to marry her.

It’s so depressing, Jennifer says, that she’s considered jumping off the Sunshine Skyway, just to make it stop.

That’s not surprising to Dr. Melissa Teitelman , a gastroenterologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

A prolonged occurrence “can be pretty miserable,” she said. “People become suicidal.”

 

He'll have a clever, yet caustic take on the case, I'm sure.

 

This one was the original

 

This was once a subplot on the Sopranos.

Turns out Tony and Skinny Tony (Steve Buscemi) had an uncle who had the hiccups for a year, and the bosses let him retire to a farm.

 

It's all over!!!
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/01/Southpinellas/Hic____hic____Hooray.shtml

The hiccups stopped around 5 p.m. Wednesday.

 

She sipped pickle juice, held her breath, breathed into a bag, even went to a neurologist, but for more than five weeks nothing would stop a 15-year-old girl's rapid hiccups — until they finally just stopped on their own.