In what has got to be a news story that puts the whole Anna Nicole and Britney Spears stories to shame, a 15-year-old Florida girl who had the hiccups for more than five weeks can finally breathe freely again. For more than five weeks nothing would stop her rapid hiccups until they finally just stopped on their own. According to Jennifer Mee of St. Petersburg, said her hiccups suddenly stopped around 5 p.m. Wednesday. No one is certain why. Maybe it was because of the home remedies and comments made by everybody who witnessed this tragedy. Read on.
She sipped pickle juice, held her breath, breathed into a bag, drank water from the far side of the glass, put sugar under her tongue, even went to a neurologist along with countless other home remedies. Nothing had helped. Even well-meaning strangers have approached Jennifer at Wal-Mart and attempted to scare the hiccups away. Still, she hiccuped.
She was in first-period class when the hiccups began. It was January 23rd. After about 15 minutes of these nonstop spasms, Jennifer Mee, a ninth-grader at Northeast High School, sought help at the campus medical clinic. She remained there for five hours while the staff worked with her. Still, her hiccups persisted at a
rate of approximately 50 times a minute.
Her mother, Rachel Robidoux, remarked that Jennifer sounds like a barking chihuahua or a smoke alarm with a dying battery. She said that at first it was kind of funny, but now it's become much more than an annoyance. "It's actually really stressful," Jennifer said. "Really, there's nothing much I can do except stay home. I just want to be a normal teenager again," Robidoux also said during Park's interview.
As strange as it might sound, there are three classifications of hiccups. A regular bout is anything up to two days. If they last longer, they’re called persistent hiccups. More than a month, they’re deemed intractable. As many as 100 diseases have been reported to cause hiccups.
Charles Osborne of Iowa has the dubious distinction of being on record as having the longest case of hiccups on record. His diaphragm spasms lasted 69 years and five months. Osborne's hiccups occurred every 11/2 seconds.
I am so glad that Jennifer has overcome this horrible problem. May your life be filled with happiness (hiccup), joy (hiccup), peace (hiccup) and love (hiccup, hiccup)!
