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And people call me dramatic[/caption]I first realized my stomach and I were different back in kindergarten when, upon seeing the contents of my lunchbox, my teacher took me to the office to call my grandmother. She assumed that I was somehow responsible for the tastycakes and canned soda. "What did you send him to lunch with, Mrs. Allen?"
"Let me think. A fatback and egg sandwich, one of those apple pies he likes, some cheetos and a soda."
"Nevermind. Sorry to bother you."
Everyone else was eating PBJ or Oscar Mayer. Everyday at lunch was like show and tell for me.
Me: And this is a scrapple sandwich.
Stunned Onlookers: Oooh, Aaah. What's scrapple?
Me: I think it's like a hamburger
(It isn't. It most certainly, horrifyingly, is not!)
By high school I was notorious for eating what my best friend dubbed "heart attack sandwiches." I don't know if my grandmother was just trying to get rid of leftovers or was dealing with 'Dory from Nemo' short term memory loss, but it was all too common to get an egg, fatback, bacon, and smoked sausage sandwich on toast with jelly, miracle whip and ketchup. My stomach didn't flinch at the challenge.
By college, however, I think I put too many miles on my stomach and voided the warranty. My cafeteria sucked so bad in college that many nights I'd walk in and right back out of the cafeteria. If someone turns down "lasagna" in favor of a 33 cent can of potted meat, then that should tell you something. It wasn't long before I got married and had my own place, but as faithful readers know, those were the poverty years.
$20 a month for groceries to feed two people translates into ramen noodles and hot dogs. Eat that twice a day for two years and you're lucky if you still have a stomach. My problem was that I didn't have a throat. You know me...I always have to develop the rare illnesses. One day I was walking to lunch when I burped. The food from the day before came up. Not the night before...the day before.
I'd been having this pain in my chest and throat for a while, but assumed it was indigestion. My primary care doctor at the time was an idiot, so I scheduled my own appointment with a gastroenterologist. At the time I worked for a health insurance company, so I knew that I didn't need a referral to see a specialist. The gastroenterologist, however, disagreed. She was offended that I scheduled an endoscopy (tube down your throat with a camera) on my own, and made it her point to chew me out as they were prepping me for it.
Just as I was trying to return fire, this [lady] says, "I don't have time for this crap" and turns on the anesthesia. I have to give it to her, there are hundreds of people who wish they could shut me up so easily. I woke up and she was gone. She called a few days later to apologize and said that I was right to come in. I had some form of esophagitis that she'd never seen before. Something was triggering the muscles in my throat to relax for several hours and also causing the sphincter leading to my stomach to tighten up. In a nutshell, the food I was eating was just sitting in my throat with nowhere to go for hours or even a day at a time. If you haven't guessed already, that hurt likes hell.
The closest allergy appointment was a year out, so I basically had to do a rotating fast and figure out what caused it on my own. I gave up sodas, fast food, processed snacks, fried food, and meat. It would've been easier to go cold turkey from heroin. Overnight I went from speaking fast food menus like a second language to sitting at my desk at work eating a bag of raw broccoli florets for lunch.
I went from never cooking to making EVERYTHING from scratch. I even made my own salad dressing and breakfast cereal. It was hell. After six months, all of my symptoms were gone. As crazy as this sounds, I canceled the allergy appointment. I felt so much better with the new diet that I was afraid that I would stop if I found out the specific trigger. I slowly reintroduced meat back into my diet, but most of that other stuff didn't make the cut. After eight years, I still don't know exactly what triggers it. The sheer pain associated with it keeps me out of places like Five Guys too often. Considering how good that burger was yesterday, I can't say that's necessarily a bad thing.
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