I Want to Burp but I Can't

Recently, I had an episode where I felt like I needed to burp, but no matter what, I couldn't.  I could swallow air, but it felt like air was being trapped in my esophagus.   I tried to drink water, but it only made it worse.  It felt like water would only go down a certain point and stop as if it stopped at the sphincter that enters the stomach.  The pain was excruciating.  I didn't know what it was.  I had a co-worker drive me over to the emergency room.  I told them that I had chest pain and immediately, they took an EKG on me.  I told the technician that it wasn't my heart!  I had pain in my esophagus area!  My EKG turned out to be fine.  My blood pressure was through the roof though.  It was 200/100.  A normal BP is 118/50 for me.  People could tell that I was in extreme pain, my face was red and I never felt so horrible.  I sat in the waiting room for an hour and a half and they finally called me in.  The staff did a turnover with the night crew and I saw a triage nurse.  About 30 minutes later, I spoke to the Doc and I told him my symptoms.  He said, "what helps with the inability to burp is a carbonated beverage like 7-up."  He left and I didn't see him again for another 3 hours.  Between that, I got a couple of chest x-rays and they turned out normal.  A nurse gave me a "G.I. cocktail" which numbed my mouth and throat and I would assume that it did the same for my esophagus.  I didn't fell better though.  I just waited and waited.  Eventually, someone came in and verified that my blood pressure went down and then I was shortly released.  They couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.  My diagnosis was "gastric pain".  I almost yelled at the doctor.  I asked why they didn't scope me to see if I had some kind of tumor or something.  He laughed and said, "scope in the ER?!?  I need you to go see your primary care provider and he can give you a referral to the GI clinic."   My visit was so disappointing that I left pretty pissed.  I wasted five hours of my life just to find out it was confirmed that I had gastric pain.

I figured that I had something called heartburn.  When I was sitting in the ER,  I had plenty of time to google all my symptoms on my phone and all signs were pointing to heartburn.  Next time I have heartburn, I'm going to take Alka-Seltzer or drink some carbonated beverage or something.