Gag Order

I've always felt that I have an overactive gag reflex. I gag when I brush my teeth. Is that normal? I had an endoscopy several years back. They put me out and things went swimmingly. Then I had another one. This time they just numbed my throat with some spray or something, insisting that it would be okay. It wasn't. I gagged throughout the procedure. Maybe it's psychological, but since then every time someone tries to shove something up my nose or down my throat I tense up and the whole sorry mess becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. So here I was, lying helpless in the ICU, with a feeding tube up my nose. Upon awakening from the sedation, I must have felt uncomfortable with that foreign object snaking its way down to my stomach, because I groggily yanked it out. I was still half in a stupor; I didn't even know what it was. Several doctors tried getting that sucker back down where it belonged, to no avail. So guess who they turned to? Bingo! Good ol' Bob. The guy knew what he was doing but also knew me; he knew how to talk to me, how to calm me down, how to get me to acquiece and agree to things to which I had no intention of agreeing. After a while they were thinking about giving me solid foods and they wanted to administer a test appropriately called "Feest" (Flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing with Sensory Testing). They wheeled in this really nasty looking aparatus that included a scope that was as wide as my Johnny Cash finger (private joke) and longer than the Crimean War (private joke that even I don't understand). I very nastily informed them to get that contraption the hell out of my room. I may have even used my Johnny Cash finger. They left, never to return. That meant that I couldn't get real food and that I was stuck with that damn tube up my nose. Brilliant, dontcha think?