Breaking News: As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007, Jennifer Mee's hiccups suddenly stopped.
For several weeks now, 15-year-old Jennifer Mee of St. Petersburg, FL has been suffering from a bad case of the hiccups. She has tried every remedy possible and even went through medical testing, but nothing has worked.
Mee hiccups 50-times a minute. What started out as funny has become an annoyance which causes her pain and isolation .
In the weeks since, she has seen a pediatrician, a cardiologist and a neurologist. She has had blood tests, a CT scan and an MRI. She had an allergic reaction to one medication, which triggered hives.
One doctor surmised that Jennifer has a tic disorder, perhaps even Tourette’s syndrome, but Robidoux said her daughter does not twitch or have inappropriate outbursts, two common symptoms of the condition.
Hiccups, involuntary spasms of the diaphragm, have a variety of causes ranging from sudden excitement or stress to eating too much too fast.
There are three classifications for hiccups: 1) regular bout - anything up to two days; 2) persistent hiccups - lasting a month or less; 3) intractable - lasting more than a month.
Even having the hiccups for a couple minutes annoys me so I cannot imagine having it for 3 weeks straight. Whenever I have the hiccups my remedy is to take big deep breaths. What is your hiccups remedy?
Related articles: Hiccup Girl (Time, 1944) Charles Osborne [wiki] had the hiccups for 68 years and was able to live a normal life.
Update: Several people have commented about the Jennifer Mee story in different areas of this blog -- I have provided the links to those comments/posts below.
Related posts on BlogCadre: hiccups Jennifer Mee, hiccup girl (image)
A Chinese traditional way of stopping hiccups
