This goes for everyone- don’t overlook ANY unusual symptoms of anything. Get it checked out. The worst (or best) thing is that they find nothing. Great. But getting the jump early probably saved my life. Esophageal cancer has fairly poor outcomes mostly because it is detected too late. As soon as I started having difficulty swallowing food, and it didn’t clear up for a few weeks, I reached out to my GI and got an endoscopy. I was what they refer to as stage 3+, which means it had spread only to localized lymph nodes and not elsewhere. But it would have pretty shortly thereafter. And then it’s a totally different ballgame. So get checked out asap. It most certainly can be a matter of life and death.
Day 6 in the hospital. A bit better each day. But it’s incremental. It’s clear this is going to be a long slow recovery. Oh and I should post in the short thread that I shit myself in bed trying to pass gas as I’m very bloated with my new plumbing design.