Introductory Lectures in Pretentious Gastric Illness

As some of you know from my bellyaching, I am an expert in stomach trouble. This was not always the case.  For most of my twenties I had so brawny a belly I insisted on starting every day with black coffee on an empty stomach.  Back then, in my own gastric Camelot, I had no problem with wine, red or white, and I said so cockily of whiskey “If you don’t like it straight, you don’t really like it.” I scoffed at Zantac and hadn’t even heard of Fruit Gaviscon, let alone learned how delicious this product can be in tablet form.


Alas, my glory days ended in San Francisco, Easter, 2009, when I developed a grand and historic case of vomiting, the true violence of which can only be attested to by my traveling companion, Laura Thompson, who listened to the whole thing through a bathroom door in the King George.  When I alone try to convince folks how bad the barfing really was, I have to rely on the rhetorical effectiveness of two facts.  One, I stayed in the hotel room without eating a thing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., getting up out of bed only to launch hourly attacks on the room’s only toilet, Laura’s ears, and my dignity.  (This was despite the fact that it was my last day in the Bay Area, one of America’s finest culinary hubs. Sigh.)  Two, I was so incapacitated by my hurling that I totally relied on Laura to pack my bags, not to mention force me into an upright position and put me on my flight home, unfortunately timed for the break of dawn.  As a result, I left behind my iPod, my hair straightener, and a good amount of American cash, at least enough for some fine SF coffee beans and a few loaves of sourdough.  (Note: this oversight was in no way Laura’s fault; I had left this crap in the bedside table and I was too sick to recall anything but the Danish I blamed for the pathogen happily touring my tummy like a mini San Fran.)  On the way to the airport, our cabbie briefly fell asleep on the highway, yet my fear that I would die that day increased only very slightly from baseline.

I hope this convinces you I experienced a very serious gastric illness in California last year; if not, I’m happy to give you Laura’s number, though I doubt she wants to relive it. Following this memorable spring break, I developed a very touchy tummy indeed. A week after sort-of recovering from my acute illness, I awoke to a sudden Ginsu in the stomach and couldn’t stand upright; this prompted a cab to the walk-in, a prescription for a proton pump inhibitor, and my very first bottle of fruity Gaviscon.  I didn’t eat anything but ice cream and hot milk for five days.  For the next six months, I still gravitated toward creamy food, rarely felt normal sensations of hunger or fullness, and spent more money on Gaviscizzy (as I began to fondly call it) than on real groceries.  In November, I started taking prescription Nexium every day, which was more effective than Gaviscon but lacked crunch and a note of citrus.

My only patch of relief from stomach symptoms in 2009 was when I was in Paris for three weeks, following the Very Best Available Diet for Weight Gain.  Of course, this diet represented a departure for me as I usually sublimate the urge to eat an entire loaf of bread for my petit dej.  It was also the first time in a long time I wasn’t drinking black coffee on an empty stomach; the hotel I was staying in not only offered a liter of irresistible hot chocolate with its continental breakfast, it had instituted a ban on hot coffee, offering in its place tepid black paint.  Thus, if I ever took a coffee in Paris, it was invariably after breakfast, only once my stomach was coated with cocoa.  On most days, I ended up skipping coffee altogether.  I had quickly become too embarrassed to go into Starbucks in Paris, as this is exclusively for tourists (the chubby, unabashed, slapstick kind- not pretentious foreigners like myself) - and you can’t get a filter coffee anywhere else in France!  Moreover, it was contrary to the principles of my holiday budget to buy espressos (i.e., under ‘Beverage Rules’: “Price-per-milliliter, following Euro-CDN conversion, must not induce attacks of acute vomiting”).  So when I craved a black coffee, I reached for a café au lait, a lait chaud avec plein de sucre, more chocolat, some Nutella or a quiche Lorraine instead.

I had felt pretty damn great in Paris not drinking coffee, so when I got home I started to wonder…was my Black Beauty to blame after all?  Certainly many people, including my mother, who donated much of my DNA and has to limit her own java intake, had advanced this hypothesis.  Since I had always drunk loads of black coffee, I was loath to suddenly pin my belly blues on my barista.  Yet I couldn’t argue with Paris, so as a compromise I switched to lattés.  This, it seemed, was moderately effective at keeping my belly blithe- until I experienced a two-week exacerbation that no dose of Nexium, no flavor of Gaviscon could combat! My coffee bean hypothesis no longer seemed to hold water- even after days of total espressobriety, I couldn’t take anything but milk.  (Though the milk I took with Vanilla Nesquik and whipped cream.)  Any time I did try to eat, I felt like the food stuck in my esophagus and wouldn’t go down, like anything solid threatened to choke me, then burn a hole in my lifeless gut.  Given my way with words, after two weeks on a liquid diet and a notable weight loss, I got squeezed in for a gastroscopy (i.e., where they Annie Leibovitz your tum-tum via your cakehole).

And?? So???

Nothing. They didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see! I had been taking Nexium daily for seven months, yet there was no evidence of acid stomach, let alone a hiatus hernia or an ulcer (excuses I had used repeatedly over the last year to explain my food fussiness to friends.)  Faced with the daunting authority of empiricism, I had no choice but to try to eat regular food.  With time, this strategy actually worked, and I even discarded the Nexium.  Who knows now what I can say about San Francisco, or Paris, or coffee, or milk! (Except that the latter is delicious- I was never tired of it, even after two weeks.)

Apologies in advance to those who will be unsatisfied, but here is the moral of my story: I’ve come to believe that stomach symptoms can be caused by stress.

Yawn!!!! WTF?

No seriously- please don’t throw Fruit Gaviscon at me just yet! You see, I love hunting for the causes of friends’ food sensitivities and intolerances and I plan to introduce much of this material into this forum.  Of course, stomach symptoms often have a physical cause- but sometimes they don’t! Unless you think I am a malingerer, or psychologically unstable (hypotheses made improbable by my upfront nature and wordy writing style), I urge you to consider the possibility that stress is as legitimate a cause for illness as real- er, I mean, physical - pathology.

If any of you said I could talk about your tummies and want to revoke my privileges, let me know.  I have not only Fruit, but Orange Burst, Butterscotch, AND Peppermint with Soothing Action with which to bribe you!