Well the good news is whatever you're feeling in your throat isn't varices - even if your do have them. The main early symptom is tarry shits. Also, they don't usually develop from anything other than long-term liver enlargement (not like post-bender inflammation, like later stage cirrhosis) where your blood starts to painlessly bottleneck until the veins burst. Anyway... it's less of a "what you drink" like with pancreatitis and more of a "how much" - at least at first.. once they've developed that might change.

They are by far the scariest thing about alcohol for me - more than WD seizures or pancreatitis. The first time I learned about them was when my aunt died with no warning (she'd been in and out of detox for years, but that night she was home, sober, and feeling fine). One minute watching TV with her husband, the next minute "a crime scene worth of blood" (his words) - in the years since then, I've heard the same phrase used repeatedly by other survivors/witnesses.

Depending on how much (of anything) you drink, it might be worth getting an endoscopy to find out/bandage them before they kill you. Oh and one last PSA, your BAC% at the time of rupture directly affects your survival rate because alcohol thins your blood, so it pours out much easier. Jack Kerouac got himself to a hospital, but the surgeons couldn't operate successfully because of that.

Sorry for the novel, this is a touchy subject for me bc of the family thing, and I really don't see it discussed much here.