Salivating at the thought...

So my co-worker at the next desk over wasn't in the office yesterday. We (the other people in our cube aisle) were actually fairly worried; we'd gotten a group-wide e-mail in the morning saying he was taking his wife to the doctor, but the e-mail at 11:30 saying he'd just work from home (it's a fairly long commute for him) only went to our manager, so from our point of view he went to the doctor's at like 8:45 and never came home. But it turned out everything was fine, just a communications hiccup. But I'm bringing it up, because the story's interesting.

Apparently, two nights ago, his wife was eating dinner, and her throat started swelling. Both sides, almost like swollen lymph nodes. They called the doctor's overnight emergency line, and he said it sounded like a mild allergic reaction. "Is she having trouble swallowing?" "Not really." "Is she having trouble breathing?" "No." "Then take a couple of Ibuprofen to take down the swelling, and go to the ER if she picks up any new symptoms or it gets worse. Schedule an allergy test for some time to look into it." So she takes a couple of ibuprofen, the swelling goes down, they go to bed, everything's fine.

Next morning, she's eating her cereal, and her neck starts swelling again. So they call the doctor, say "We're coming in now", he sends a quick e-mail to the group, and off they go. She gets looked at... And the doctor tells her to go out, buy some lemon drops, start sucking on them, and go home.

Apparently, what was wrong - and I've never heard of this before, though I suppose it makes some level of sense - was that the channels leading out of her salivary glands got blocked somehow. When she started eating, she started salivating, but the channels were blocked so the glands started swelling up - like a balloon being filled with water. And the doctor's advice was "Well, make yourself salivate more. Eventually it'll work itself out."

That's... Kinda freaky. :-P

Ahhh, well. Back to work and all that jazz.