Navaho Gunleg

I have got calculi in my salivary glands and it sometimes acts up.

You know, if you had biology in school, there are 2 tiny little holes on the floor of your mouth, about where your tongue attaches, where your saliva comes into your mouth.

Basically, what happens is that sometimes — and this is usually when I am eating — one duct that brings the saliva into my mouth is blocked by some white stuff. No problem, you’d say, you still got another saliva duct so enough saliva will still get into your mouth to be able to eat.

Yes, there is enough saliva in my mouth, but here is the problem: my salivary gland does not know that it is blocked so it keeps on producing saliva. This in turn causes my glands to swell up immensely: you can see a big bulge forming below my jaw.

And it also expands internally — causing pressure against my throat, making it extremely painful, thus hard, to swallow. This pain is pretty hard to describe… it’s like … when you throw up after having too much to drink and ate to much food whole and unchewed. You can imagine, or remember, that food hurts on it’s way back up through you throat. Well, it’s like that feeling, the main difference being I’m trying to swallow chewed food.

The first time this happened to me was when I was eating tomato-soup in 2001. Having had cat-scratch-disease I thought this was just my old swelling acting up and didn’t pay it any more mind as it went away after a few hours.

At a later time, I believe I was eating something with peanuts in it and it happened again. This time, more painful, and as I was home I went to the bathroom to check things out. That’s when I first noticed that there was something actually blocking my saliva duct! I did then realise possible consequences of the salivary gland keeping on producting while the stuff can’t get out — I freaked thinking about the gland ‘exploding’ in my neck.

So what does a man do? Of course, he tries to solve things by himself.

With a pair of cotton-tip applicators I was able to massage and force the white thing outward. Painful, yeah, because the floor of your mouth is pretty sensitive. After couple of minutes I was able to pop a little white thingy out and I felt and heard the saliva being released from my gland, going through the duct like a *woooosh* in my head. That really, really felt great.

So in total, I have been experiencing those painful episodes, 5 or 6 times now, over the last 6 years, messing up a couple of dinners. I thought it was some weird allergy, really. I didn’t touch tomato-soup since!

Only since about 2 or 3 years, thanks to some smart googling by my girlfriend have figured out it is salivary duct calculus that is causing these episodes. She only found a couple of Dutch sites though and at that time, I did not seem to find find anything relevant in English, because I really didn’t know any English term.

Obviously, I thought I was a freak. Nobody I knew ever heard about it, and that isn’t strange because I hadn’t before, either.

A week ago I was happily eating my girlfriends’ home-made tomato-soup and nothing happened I could enjoy it all. We even talked about that it was ages ago that it last happened.

Of course, a few days later (last weekend), it happened again. This time it was pretty painful again and I ran upstairs to the bathroom for the usual poke-and-massage-it-out routine. Looking inside my mouth, the two spit-holes seemed OK so I thought it’s OK, let’s continue eating. I went downstairs again, took another bite, and I really hurt when I tried to swallow it. So I went upstairs again, because this really felt the same as before. Again, I couldn’t see nothing… I really wanted to because I could force it out and go on eating my dinner!

After a couple of minutes of swinging back and forth between uh-oh-let’s-go-upstairs-and-check-it-out and hmm-really-nothing-let’s-continue-dinner I finally noticed the usual white spot behind one spithole.

I must’ve used about 20 cotton-tips to try to force it out, it was really a pain (as I write this 2 days after, the bottom of my mouth is still sore). I got a bit of white stuff out, but it was definitaly not all so I kept on massaging and forcing it. This even caused a small internal bleeding in my duct. The skin of the bottom of my tongue being fairly thin and transparent I could see a red spot between the spit-hole and the white stuff. I kept on forcing it out and I see the red spot popping, the blood from it merging with the out-flowing saliva and the rest of the white stuff coming out with a *woooosh* of saliva entering my mouth and my swollen saliva gland finally reducing.

Curious about possible causes and remedies I starting searching the web again. That is when I discovered this UK site about the condition, with a link to a forum with user experiences.

I was amazed at the amount of people suffering from this same, freaky and rare condition. Some people have even worse and more painful episodes so I guess I can consider myself “lucky” not having stones the size of an almond which have to surgically removed with possible nerve-damage.

I have read some pretty freaky stuff, about nerves growing the wrong way back causing one fellow his face’s sweat-glands to activate while chewing — or people without feeling in parts of their face after the surgery. I’ve always been pretty hesitant about surgery; and if I read that in some cases it didn’t really solve anything — or only temporary — it doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

So.. as far as I now understand, nobody really knows what exactly causes it, only that it statistically happens more to males than females. It is theorised that it may be caused by periods of reduced saliva production and that a steady flow of saliva may reduce changes of blockage by accumulating calculi, so for this I need to find some herbs or simply some sour candies to induce saliva production.