Soft palate hyperawareness

[Lovechopin]

Hi all, I have a history of sensorimotor OCD. In April 2024 I felt like I had misswallowed a vitamin gummy and was scared some of it had got lodged. After 10 days of anxiety I went to ENT who performed a nasal endoscopy. I wasn't expecting the scope to hurt (I'd had a nasal endoscopy a few years ago and hardly felt it) but I found it really painful. I froze and toughed it out, wish I had asked ENT to stop. After the procedure I felt like I couldn't breathe or swallow properly and went to A&E in a panic. They tried to reassure me that the scope could have caused minor trauma but it would clear up.

Ever since the scope i've had a weird sensation in my soft palate, like a tension or that something is stuck there. I am aware of it 24/7. At times it feels like my soft palate is sagging yet when I look in the mirror it appears normal. The ENT said the scope wouldn't affect the soft palate. Could this be another form of sensorimotor OCD? Anyone got or had a similar sensation?

[deValentin]

When I was younger, my attention became so stuck on my salivation and the swallowing of my saliva that I couldn't think of anything else, and I was salivating and swallowing my saliva all the time. It almost drove me "insane". It lasted for two weeks. My mistake, at first, was to try to directly suppress the thought. You probably heard of the pink elephant paradox: the more you try to suppress a thought, the more it persists in your mind. Once I stopped trying to suppress the unwanted thought and focused on other activities, it gradually went away on its own. For a while, I was afraid the thought may come back to harass me, but with the passing of time, trust in the spontaneous self-regulation of my mind returned, and everything has been fine ever since in that domain.

In a letter entitled "A Coldness and Desertion of the Spirit" the Scottish philospher David Hume wrote about a similar experience as he was suffering a bout of depression: "At last, about April 1730, when I was nineteen years of age, a symptom, which I had noticed a little from the beginning, increased considerably; so that, though it was no uneasiness, the novelty of it made me ask advice; it was what they call a ptyalism or wateryness in the mouth. Upon my mentioning it to my physician, he laughed at me and told me I was now a brother, for that I had fairly got the disease of the learned. . ."