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The British man who has hiccuped non-stop for 15 MONTHS
Last updated at 00:07am on 08.05.08Normally a glass of water does the trick. But this bout of the hiccups could never be described as normal.
Christopher Sands has been hiccupping persistently for 15 months and is now considering having an operation to cure his problem.
He has tried all the traditional treatments and many more besides, including hypnotherapy, yoga, reiki, herbal medicine and an oxygen chamber.
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Hiccup hell: Christopher Sands, who has been hiccupping every two seconds for the last 15 months, says he has tried drinking water 'a hundred different ways' to end the non-stop bout
But he still hiccups every two seconds for up to 12 hours a day, and believes he may have done so 10million times now since the attack began in February last year.
During intense spells, Mr Sands, 24, from Lincoln, cannot eat or sleep. As a backing singer in a rock band, he has also been disabled professionally.
He has undergone scans of the brain, chest and abdomen to try to trace the source of the problem, but none produced a definitive answer.
He had begun to fear he may be stuck with the hiccups for life, but is now pinning his hopes on keyhole surgery.
Doctors believe he may have a damaged stomach valve which causes an acid reflux condition.
Experts at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre will construct a new 'valve' between the oesophagus and the stomach by wrapping the upper part of the stomach around the lowest point of the oesophagus.
Mr Sands suffered his first extended attack of hiccups for two weeks in September 2006. They went away inexplicably but returned early the following year.
He cannot drive because of the risk he may crash, and is exhausted all the time.
"I'm wondering if I'll be like this forever," he said. "Nobody has any idea what started them. Struggling for air is possibly the worst part of this whole thing. It's really quite frightening.
"The heartburn combined with them is really getting to me. It makes me physically sick. Hopefully the operation will help.
"We did a gig a couple of weeks ago, and ten minutes before it started I had an attack. My bandmates said we could pull out, but I didn't want to do that so I got a pint of coke and started downing it, and eventually got rid of them just before we were about to start playing."
American Charles Osborne holds the record for the longest bout of hiccups, which lasted for 68 years from 1922 until 1990.
