Man Had the Hiccups for 2 Years Before Doctors Finally Cured Him

If I have hiccups for more than a minute, I start to wonder if being alive is all it’s cracked up to be. And then I hold my breath for a bit, the hiccups go away, and I go on living my life like I just didn’t just have a very dark thought.

I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be a guy at the center of a medical paper published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports who had to endure a solid two years of near-constant hiccupping.

An old man in Lebanon had been dealing with perpetual hiccups for two years. Nothing he did brought him relief. Doctors were baffled. It didn’t make any sense. The poor man would deal with a ferocious bout of hiccups for a bit and then they would fade for a moment, offering temporary relief, only to come roaring back shortly thereafter.

Doctors prescribed him all sorts of medications and treatments to alleviate the hiccups—muscle relaxers, antipsychotics, protein pump inhibitors. Nothing worked.

A blood test found that the man had elevated levels of eosinophil, a white blood cell that protects against parasitic infection. Normally, around 1 to 4 percent of a person’s white blood cells will be eosinophil. This guy, who had no parasitic infection, was at 18 percent.

Man Hospitalized After 2 Years of Hiccups Found to Have Rare Condition

This pointed to a condition called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), where these cells accumulate in the esophagus, sometimes causing symptoms like heartburn or trouble swallowing. But the man didn’t have the typical signs of EoE

EoE is rare in older adults and often linked to food allergies, but nothing about this man’s case presented with traditional symptoms. Trying to think outside the box, the doctors hypothesized that the buildup of eosinophils in his esophagus might have triggered misfires in the vagal nerve, which controls the diaphragm, causing his maddening case of perpetual hiccups.

As is often the case with these medical mystery types of stories, the doctors prescribed him a common, extremely normal treatment, in this case, a topical steroid cream, and his eosinophil count dropped to normal levels. Within a week, his hiccups had finally, mercifully went away. His nightmare was over.