When the Turkey Bites Back: A Holiday Tale

The Thanksgiving tales of Dr. Stephen Severance are not so much heart-warming as stomach churning.

With today’s launch of peak overeating season, the gastrointestinal specialist at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center said doctors like him will be consumed with treating holiday celebrators who’ve had one too many drumsticks. Or who laughed while chewing and began choking. Or who somehow inhaled their turkey dinner so fast they got bones lodged in their throats.

“It ends up being a very costly Thanksgiving dinner -- the $2,000 turkey breast,” said Severance, 62, whose medical group is on call at Long Beach Memorial, Long Beach Community and Los Alamitos medical centers.

A colleague, not he, will be on call this year, but Severance has taken his turn among eight doctors in his practice who treat the dining misadventures that arrive at the three hospitals.

He likes to recall the year a new gastroenterologist in his practice dislodged turkey from seven people in two days in the hospital emergency rooms. But let her tell the story.

“I’ll never forget that Thanksgiving, my first on-call with the practice,” said Dr. Diana Yao, 39.

“That and the diamond ring this one lady swallowed, you don’t forget that stuff.

“It was a nice ring too. One big diamond, two smaller ones.

“She was running around yelling, ‘Hallelujah! Praise Jesus! They found my ring!’ ”

Thanksgiving indiscretions kick off the annual plop-plop-fizz-fizz season. Coupled with Christmas and New Years, this time of group feeding is a sales trifecta Pepto-Bismol makers call “the perfect pink storm.”

And with it comes an uptick in emergencies.

Hospitals are otherwise slow this time of year, “except for our department,” Severance said, as people delay elective procedures because they don’t want to spend holidays there.

The most common problems for revelers who consume too much too fast are usually emergencies.

Contrary to popular assumption, gastroenterologists don’t do as much of what is commonly called stomach pumping as they do removing and extracting stuck objects via endoscopy.

The most common problem, they said, involves people who can’t swallow because they have turkey stuck in the esophagus or who accidentally swallow a poultry bone or scarf down the feast so rapidly that they grow digestively distressed.

“People usually eat around 6. By 11 that night, they can’t choke it down, this poor person can’t swallow now, and so we see them a lot in the middle of the night,” Yao said.

“They were drinking and talking and eating and -- whoops -- it happens: laugh, swallow, choke.”

Last year, she was on call and “dreading it. Dreading it. I thought, ‘Am I going to get all those food [cases] again?

“It was all I could think about,” Yao said.

Her concern turned out to be warranted.

“I saw this person who swallowed too big a piece of meat and they said, ‘I thought if I kept eating, it would push it down,’ but with meat it doesn’t always work. So we go in with a 15- or 17-millimeter scope and we can look on a screen to see what’s down there. We go in and cut it up and push it down usually, but sometimes we need to pull it out.”

Is Yao a vegetarian after eight years at this?

“No, but I am a very good chewer,” she says.

Too much alcohol is another problem at this time of year, the doctors said. Drinking enough to become nauseated can injure the esophagus or cause what Severance said has been dubbed “holiday heart” -- arrhythmia.

Another peril is the combination of too much alcohol and some hangover remedies, which can cause ulcers.

“Mostly people come in with pieces of stuck meat. It’s not a gastrointestinal problem, it’s a chewing problem, and it hardly ever turns into a life-or-death situation,” Severance said.

Severance cautions people to be mindful of history and culture: Upper-class Europeans in the 1800s routinely binged and purged so as to dine and not offend hosts at several banquets a day. This led to the discovery by a Dutch doctor after whom it is named of Boerhaaves syndrome, which results in a lethal tear in the esophagus.

And Severance cited Okinawa as having the world’s largest number of people living past the age of 100, longevity that he said has been attributed by researchers to a fish-rich diet and to eating slowly.

Severance said even he might be tempted to “pig out” on Thanksgiving, but he added that the key is to eat slowly.

Many diners solve their own mild indulgences with tonics like Tums and Alka-Seltzer, which enjoy their greatest sales of the year during the holidays, according to Advertising Age reporter Jack Neff.

Vince Hudson, marketing director for gastrointestinal products at Proctor & Gamble -- the biggest seller of over-the-counter gastrointestinal remedies with Metamucil, Prilosec and Pepto-Bismol sales accounting for 20% of the market and $500 million in annual gross sales -- said flu season coupled with chow season create the manufacturer’s best sales quarter.

“The country’s forefathers probably didn’t expect this holiday [to be] such an indulgent period, but it turned out that way. Which is good for us at Pepto,” he said.

For those who need help beyond that, the medical team is standing by.

Urged Yao: “Chew, chew, chew. Then chew some more.”