On Mortality and the Look of the Thing

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I have just nearly choked to death. I had just come in for the night and was grabbing a bite, and I just took too big a bite of something and couldn't quite swallow it. The trouble was, I couldn't get it from the back of my throat, and it just slid back towards my oesophagus again. It couldn't go forward, couldn't go back and it started oh so slowly blocking off my airway. I was, in essence, slowly going to choke to death.
So, yeah, then I was, like, choking to death and stuff. I felt my airway start to obstruct, my breathing started to get harder, and my epiglottis kinda fluttered to try to shepherd the blockage the other way. What was funny was that I was still very detached from the situation. I felt myself start to panic, and I distinctly told myself "No, stop panicking, this is ridiculous. You're not going to die on the kitchen floor at 20, without doing anything with your life. I mean, YOU'RE not going to DIE at 20. It just won't do."

That worked just fine, I actually felt myself calm down at that. I went over to the sink, poured a glass of water and took a drink. It backed up into my throat. I couldn’t swallow. The blockage was now stopping my epiglottis from flipping over. I pitched forward and the water fell back out of my mouth. At that point, my brain flipped the switch from indignant aloofness into full-blown, tendon-cramping panic. My hands starting telling Gromit the cheese wasn’t in the rocket, and I had a blindingly clear thought. “People do die like this. You could be one of them”.

I had genuinely never thought I was going to die. I had thought about it, I had talked about it and in my head I had long since accepted that fact. But in my heart, in my gut, I had never seriously considered my own mortality. I realise that this is not uncommon, that indeed nearly everyone does through this some time, but knowing that in no way diminishes the experience. Plus, my ever-helping brain justified increasing the panic exponentially, by reasoning that while nearly everyone has a near-death experience at some time in their lives, some people in fact skip the near- part altogether and jump straight into the arms of the Grim Reaper.

Luckily, my next swig managed to free me, gasping as though I’d been waterboarded. In fact the whole thing lasted less than a minute, which greatly reduced my survivor's pride, and really it's more likely that many things will come far closer to killing me before one finally gets its aim right. But even so, the entire ordeal has made a profound impact on me in three ways:

 1. I am still pathetically full of youthful dreams of immortality.

 2. Even when acknowledging the real prospect of death, I am primarily concerned with what the look of the thing would be.

3. I care about those two problems in the opposite order.
I really don’t like to consider what that says about me.

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