That suggests you're someone who's never been nervous enough to eat an entire (but small) slice of pizza in one "bite".

As someone with a different set of experiences, let me assure you, it may have *seemed* like a good idea at the time, but during the several minutes it takes to chew it enough to be able to swallow it without choking to death, it feels like anything *but* skill.

The overall sensation is one of panic. The healthy thing to do at this point is to spit it all back out and admit that you bit off far too much in one bite. However, that's socially not acceptable, and worse, it would be in front of someone whose opinions really matter to you; you would not have done this if it wasn't in front of such a person. There's no way you want to make yourself look that barbaric in front of them. So you chew and chew, hoping it will somehow work out, despite the fact that your mouth is too full to chew properly; your teeth are never actually closing all the way. It feels more like mushing the food around.

If you don't have someone to speak for you, there's also the panic of knowing that you need to actually talk about something important, and this whole business is putting that on hold. A lot of people don't want to go back to topics that were previously on the table, so there may even be the fear that you're going to lose your chance to say *anything*. All because you were trying to get the eating bit done quickly, but this is anything but fast. I don't really know how one would feel with someone to speak for them, I've never been in that situation, but I expect it would depend a large amount on how much you trusted that person to represent what you had to say, at least at the start. As they proceeded to talk, how they managed to convey what you had to say might have some bearing on the situation. However, it might not, either, because you may not be too aware of everything going on outside your mouth, as you have a possibly deadly situation going on inside your mouth.

Depending on whom you're eating with, there may be others who actually continue to eat normally, putting into sharp relief just how much slower this is than normal eating. Somebody may actually finish eating an entire slice of pizza before you've gotten to the point where you've masticated enough into small enough pieces that you can swallow them safely, and moved the food around enough in your mouth so that they're in a position to do so. If there's any particularly quick eaters, like the time I did something similar in front of my family, they may have even finished off two slices.

Up until the first swallowed pieces, there's an overriding feeling that "this is it, I'm going to die". That doesn't entirely go away at that point. You also aren't to the half way point yet. If the rest of the group didn't pause in their eating over your ordeal, it's possible by the time you've finished dealing with that one slice, everybody else is finished eating.

It's unlikely that anybody else will understand what you just experienced. At least, I've not had anybody understand when I've done something like this. There's pretty much always someone who thought they understood, but their thought was always either that I didn't want to actually talk about the thing or that I had been really hungry. The motivation for me was always wanting to get the eating out of the way quickly, which is the exact opposite of what happened.

Mind you, I've never actually done a whole slice in one bite, myself. The closest I ever got was almost everything but the crust, with two reasonably sized bites left on either side of the unreasonably sized bite that I took.

Note: I realize some of my sentences in this are pretty long. I feel like that's something of a feature, which might convey a certain amount of the feeling.

Thankyou for sharing your near death experience :)
I'm not sure which part I find most impressive - the fact that you analysed it so carefully or the fact that you were able to write this off the cuff when such an obscure opportunity presented itself!

yup lol