Rogelio Salazar was 67 when he began to fear food.
Every bite became a threat. He coughed, felt as though something was getting stuck in his throat, and hours after dinner, the food came back up undigested. His family noticed: dinners, which had once been a time for conversation, filled with silence and worried looks as he ate more and more slowly, increasingly frightened.
Doctors tried reflux, gastritis, and pharyngitis. Nothing worked. Until one of them ordered an esophagram, and there the answer appeared: a pouch in the upper part of his esophagus where food and saliva accumulated, a Zenker’s diverticulum. At last, what for months had been nothing more than a fear of the dinner table had a name.
