What it’s like to swallow swords

As told to Megan Messerly

Monday, Oct. 19, 2015 | 2 a.m.

At most, sword swallowing should be slightly uncomfortable. It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t cause bleeding. It shouldn’t cause anything except a little discomfort.

If you do it wrong, you can really hurt yourself — throwing up gallons of blood, being lightheaded and taking almost a month to recover. If you do it really wrong, there’s a chance you could slice your esophagus, get an infection that goes into your heart, and then you’re dead.

It’s about posture and controlling some primal instinct to take things out of your throat. The general rule is you stand like a boxer — not too forward, not too back. You want to be pretty straight, kicking your head back and sticking a rigid object down your throat. You never push; you let it slide in. When you push, that’s when bad things happen.

I had a great sword swallow in about 2001 and everything felt fine, but I kept getting more nauseated as the night went on. I drank a bunch of water and forced myself to vomit and out came a bunch of raspberry jelly — except I hadn’t eaten any raspberry jelly. I realized, that’s clotted blood; that’s not good.

When I got home, I decided to sleep in my car because I couldn’t get to the front door. When I got to the front door, I took a nap there because I didn’t have enough energy to get inside my house. When I finally got inside my house, I felt the urge to purge about a gallon of blood and fluid into a bucket next to me. I vomited the same amount two or three more times until I got to a hospital where they checked me out.

They said, “Oh, you’re a sword swallower? You don’t need to be put down for this.” They did an endoscopy and hospitalized me for a day and a half. I got very close to a mandatory blood transfusion, but they finally deemed me healthy enough to go. When I got out, I had to wear two shirts and three jackets and was still shivering in the sunlight because of the lack of blood in my system.

But is sword swallowing more dangerous than being a cheerleader with all the neck and spinal injuries? Is that more dangerous than putting your child on a four-wheeler and sending them out into the mountains by themselves?

When I hear the music I’ve rehearsed to, I know the movements, like a dancer. I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. That said, when I’m on autopilot, if there’s anything that’s different from what I’m used to, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Sometimes you don’t swallow the sword. And you have to think of something else to do. I haven’t had to back out of a sword swallow in a long time, but it’s better than going to the hospital. Usually the audience is pretty forgiving, and you say to yourself, “Good job for knowing your limits.”

Having a background in massage therapy, I realized that every single job people do — whether it’s being a hairdresser, a waitress, a computer programmer, a construction worker — every job you do is going to damage your body in the long run. With the job I have, I can choose which way to hurt myself and minimize the amount of damage.