You Be the Doctor: Mystery Solved

Tony Horwitz was a travel writer in his 40s and except for some long-ago kidney stones, was very healthy, until he started to experience strange pains.

"I just noticed one day that I had a sore throat in a certain spot on the right side of my throat," he said. "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm getting a cold.'"

Horwitz 's friend, Dr. Alice Flaherty, remembers that Horwitz told her his wife and son both had viruses around the same time, and he thought he'd caught the same thing.

"I had traveled down to Washington to visit my father who had just come out of the hospital after open-heart surgery," Horwitz said. "My father is a doctor and I asked him if I should take some antibiotics."

"He took some antibiotics, which didn't help at all, and then it started spreading into his teeth, so when he ate or swallowed, his teeth would hurt," said Flaherty.

Horwitz says that he had been to the dentist a few weeks prior, and "thought maybe the dentist poked a nerve or something, because I had a pain [in] a really very specific spot between two teeth."

Tale of the Tuna

Horwitz went to see a doctor in a small Virginia town near where he was staying and the doctor performed a standard check-up, including a strep test, which was negative. The doctor agreed that Horwitz , who didn't have a fever and didn't have allergies, probably had a virus. Horwitz recalls that, "[The doctor] said keep taking aspirin and drink water and hopefully it will go away."

But 10 days later, everything changed when Horwitz opened the refrigerator, found a tuna fish sandwich, and, he says "took a big bite of it."

"When I swallowed, I felt like a bomb had gone off in my throat and it sort of exploded up into my face and in my ear," he said. "And it was really so painful that I sort of … fell to the floor of the kitchen on my knees, sort of clutching my face. And I don't know exactly how long it lasted. It seemed like forever."