Oprah Winfrey recently had a health scare after her neck mystery swelled up and she feared the worst.
She describes in the November issue of “O, The Oprah Magazine” the terrifying moment Winfrey “worked myself up to a blood pressure reading of 150/80 thinking about how I was going to rearrange my life to deal with whatever this was.”Writing in her “What I Know for Sure” column, the media mogul says she was making scrambled eggs for breakfast—on an “ordinary Friday morning”—when she “turned to get a pinch of salt and noticed a bit of soreness in my neck.
The area under the left side of my chin felt tender. In the mirror, I could see it was swollen. By the time I finished making breakfast, the swelling had increased. It looked like a goiter that had come out of nowhere. I immediately Googled ‘swollen lymph gland causes.’ None of the results was good.”
Winfrey called an internist, who set an appointment for later that afternoon.
“For the next four hours, I thought the worst,” she writes. “Why would a neck suddenly swell? Maybe it wasn’t sudden. Maybe whatever it was had been growing for days, or longer, and I only now noticed.”
Naturally, she feared the worst.
“When I finally opened my mouth to say ‘ahhh,’ I was prepared for the doctor to say, ‘I’m so sorry, Ms. Winfrey, you have [insert terrible disease].’”
Luckily, she couldn’t be more grateful for the outcome, as it was less severe than she anticipated.
“What she actually said was, ‘I think your salivary glands are blocked. Go home, drink plenty of water, and try sucking on some lemons to stimulate your salivary ducts.’”
Oprah says she “couldn’t believe” it — still, she called another doctor for a second opinion and received the same diagnosis.
“I’d worked myself up to a blood pressure reading of 150/80 thinking about how I was going to rearrange my life to deal with whatever this was.”
She did as the doctor instructed and “By the next day, the swelling had gone down measurably.’
‘In two days, it had all but disappeared,” she writes.
“Our bodies are amazing. And too often we are not grateful for their perfect functioning, balancing bacteria and enzymes, managing blood flow, thrumming the sinus rhythm beat, beat, beat of our hearts day in, day out,” Oprah added. “As they say, you don’t appreciate your health until you no longer have it.”
The November issue of “O, The Oprah Magazine” is on newsstands now.
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