A Nurse with Stridor

One morning I walked into room three of the GI lab at Highsmith-Rainey Memorial Hospital, where I heard the unmistakable sound of stridor as one of the GI nurses was trying to inhale. She thought this was caused by her smoking problem, when in reality she had a severe reflux problem that was causing her vocal cords to go into spasm. I urged her to start taking Nexium twice daily and to embrace the fiber program (in addition to stopping the tobacco!). Getting off the cigarettes was difficult, but her stridor is no longer an issue. She will also now tell you that that her reflux always does so much better as long as she doesn’t get slack about the fiber program. She also does not need her reflux medicines as she did at first. Subsequently her whole family has been in to see me, so convinced is she of the benefits of the fiber therapy program.