…Of Which We Shall Not Speak

The way I felt about the word “surgery” was almost the same way I feel about taking someone’s advice who told me to chain myself to the landing gear of an airplane just before it takes off.

Medication is the last line of defense before surgery, when it comes to the way Crohn’s disease is dealt with in modern medicine. Here, we’re going to throw drug after drug at you as long as they work, and when none of them work anymore we’re sorry but we are now required to cut you open and remove your disease temporarily.

I visited my gastroenterologist in December when it was suggested that I see a surgeon and consider a resective operation to treat my disease. It wasn’t until the following May that I finally went through with it, and that was because the upper portion of my small intestine had fused together and I could no longer eat without vomiting. I literally waited until I got to the point where I would have died without surgery, before finally admitting that I needed it.

The Road To Ruin Is Paved With Poor Choices

My condition was never worse than when I was out all the time fraternizing with women, working full time and getting no sleep. I’d get in at 1am, wake up at 5am and work all day, then go out and do it all over again. The flare that eventually brought about the biggest ordeal of my life since being diagnosed came after a volatile cycle where I was “seeing” three women at once.

I don’t know if it was because I was so insecure about myself that I felt like I needed this to happen, or if I was so distrusting of others after having my heart broken. But for whatever reason, the winter after I split from my college sweetheart I got in way too deep and started running myself ragged.

I was tired, bleary-eyed, unshaven. I’d get into work and get a call from a girl who was wondering where I’d been the night before. It was somewhere she couldn’t know, because I’d make up an excuse and not tell her.

Well, this thing lasted for a good two months before I just became so overwhelmed with the fact that I was having to cancel dates just so I could go home and sleep. Eventually it got so bad that I would get home from work at 5 in the afternoon, trudge upstairs and crawl into bed exhausted. Sometimes I would barely make it home, nearly falling asleep in the car as I drove.

I would sleep for a solid 11 hours and then wake up feeling as if I’d just closed my eyes a moment before. I was very sick, and I needed a change. So I went to the doctor…

An Interesting Date

This is the story of a funny thing that happened to me after I found out I had a latex/banana allergy. Read about that whole ordeal using the inline link if you’re not up to speed.

I had just started dating this girl who I really liked a lot (at the time), and she invited me down to her parents’ place to spend the weekend with their family. So everything’s going well, and I drive down and meet her there and it’s a beautiful house on hundreds of acres. I mean a really nice place.

We sit down to dinner and it suddenly hits me that these people are vegetarians. Now, I have nothing against vegetarians – if by nothing, you mean “I think that not eating meat is the dumbest thing ever invented.” Ahem.

That weekend I ended up eating a lot of things I wasn’t used to eating. The first night was disastrous, and because of all these foreign substances I was up every five minutes of the night headed for the bathroom. We’re at her parents’ place, mind you, but I had literally just started seeing her so it’s not like we would’ve been sleeping together either way.

By morning I ‘d gotten myself together (with the help of some meds) and we went out to scout out around the fields. After a short while of running around and sweatin’ up a storm, I started feeling a bit queasy. Soon it was undeniable; this horrible thing was happening to me again. I told her I didn’t feel well and walked off into the woods to throw up. It was the same feeling I’d felt so many times before, but swore I’d keep myself away from bananas so that I would never feel it again. She came to my side, and I asked her about breakfast.

That morning I had drank a glass of some kind of mixed fruit smoothie juice. Lo and behold, it contained essence de banana. I found this out before we went back to the house and I ended up spending the entire afternoon and evening sick in bed. We were supposed to leave hours before we actually got on the road, so I missed an important event that evening.

She was really cool about the whole incident actually, and we ended up dating for awhile after that happened – the relationship ended for other reasons which I may or may not end up sharing on this blog in the future.

Attack Of The Bananas

Since I have discovered my allergy to bananas (or latex, whichever it is – I just know that I’ll never voluntarily eat a banana again) I have had two incidents where I was attacked by bananas and didn’t know it.

The first was on a day when I was feeling very stupid. I mean, I didn’t know that’s how I was feeling until I found out later.

I was at the supermarket, and at this point I had started on the wonderful Specific Carbohydrate Diet. One of the things that I love and which the diet restricts me from eating is potato chips. I was longing for something thin, crunchy and packed with sodium. I came across these things called plantain chips in the exotic/foreign foods aisle and thought they might be good to try. I then realized after looking at the picture that these looked just like bananas. As a matter of fact, once I’d gotten home and done some research on the intertubes, I found out they practically were bananas.

So I thought, “okay, this’ll be the big test then. I’m going to pound a bag of these and see what happens.”

Fortunately I was heading into a weekend where I didn’t have too many obligations. I figured it was a good time to try it out so that if, worst-case scenario, something did happen, I could chill at home and wait out the sickness.

The bag went down in minutes; it was everything I’d hoped it would be, and those chips were an excellent replacement for the potato chips I’d been longing for. I waited two hours and I felt fine, so I was beginning to doubt that it was a banana allergy which had caused those mysterious episodes of vomiting over the past year.

Then hour five rolled around and it came rumbling in like a giant on crack. My stomach turned, I started to sweat profusely, and before I knew it I was lying in bed, throwing up off the side into a bucket.

The only incident since then was actually a pretty funny story, so I’ll tell you about it in the next post.

Not Crohn’s, Not CVS

I began to piece together the information surrounding my mysterious episodes of vomiting. For the past several months I had been experiencing them at seemingly sporadic intervals, and no doctor could tell me what was wrong. It was only after a morning at church that I finally realized what was happening here.

A member of our worship team had brought in breakfast for everyone that morning. She’d baked muffins and they were delicious. Once we were done with the second service I sat in the back kitchen and talked with a couple of my friends for a little while, when I started to feel that familiar twinge in my stomach. The one where it just stopped working and the room started getting hotter than it should’ve been.

I politely excused myself and said I needed to get home; on my way out I kept the styrofoam cup I was holding, foolishly thinking it could do anything at all to catch what I knew was coming. In those days I’d gotten used to carrying a plastic shopping back with me under the seat of my car, but on this particular day the bag I pulled out had a couple of gaping holes that I hadn’t noticed when I first stashed it.

Long story short, I raced home and literally made it to the porcelain throne just in time.

As I sat there heaving, watching the contents of the day’s ingestion leaving my body, I had one of those eureka moments. I thought back to the first time this whole vomiting thing had happened. What was that milkshake I’d made for myself before work that day? Chocolate-flavored protein powder, milk, a couple of oreo cookies, and a slice of banana.

The muffins I’d eaten today: banana muffins.

That was it. Bananas. But an allergy that made me violently sick? Well, supposedly it’s not a banana allergy, but a latex allergy. I can blow up a balloon or wear rubber gloves and have no problems. This type of allergy, I believe, happens when you ingest latex. Bananas, and especially the skin, contain lots of it. So that was it, then.

I stayed away from bananas from then on and never had another vomiting incident. Haha, I’d love to be able to say that, except it isn’t true…

CVS Is Not A Pharmacy

About two seconds after I sit down on the toilet, my guts explode – only not out of the bottom. I’m now vomiting all over the floor and I deftly maneuver, spinning myself around so at least some of it hits the toilet. I’ve got a spew of the nastiest mixture I’ve ever seen lying all over the floor and everything now, but when I’m done I sit back down and release my bowels.

It’s a disaster area and I spend the next ten minutes cleaning myself so I’m at least somewhat presentable, and then going to get the mop so I can get rid of this mess. I manage to clean the floor to a fairly convincing shine, and at this point I feel much better. I was a lot more scared of throwing up back then than I am today, so I go in and tell my boss I must have some kind of bug and he lets me go home.

On the way driving back, it hits me again – another wave that feels just as bad as the first. I end up having to pull off to the side of the road and open my car door so I can dry heave out onto the ground, as car after car passes by my pathetic frame dangling from the driver’s side doorway.

At this point I’m bewildered, and I have no idea what the hell is going on. I make it home alright, and spend the next couple of days vomiting up every last ounce of everything from my stomach, until it turns yellow, then brown, then black, then clear with tiny strings of blood from the water I was trying to drink to clear myself out.

At that point I chalked the whole incident down to a number of factors combined: the fact that I was stressing out about being late to work, the fact that I’d made myself a gigantic milkshake before work and drank so much of it that I was overstuffed, and of course, my Crohn’s.

Then it happened again about a week or two later.

Being the health-savvy medical genius I am, I did a little “self-diagnosis” on the web and found out about a condition called CVS – Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. I was convinced that I had this, so as these incidents kept occurring and I kept visiting doctors who couldn’t find anything wrong, I told myself that they were stupid and I was screwed for the rest of my life. How could I ever expect to leave the house or go on even a day trip, vacation, or long car ride when I was liable to become ill at the blink of an eye and start vomiting uncontrollably for hours?

It wasn’t until months and months after the fact that I realized what was really causing this, and it wasn’t CVS.

The Rest Of Higher Education

My other college years were brief and succinct – I finished my undergraduate degree in three years. The sooner I could get out and start working, I thought, the sooner I could set myself up financially and become independent.

Back in those days things were easy. Well not really. But easier than they are now. Life is never a true walk in the park while you’re living with crohns, but at least back for the first few years I had the disease there was nothing major interrupting my life because of it. Maybe it was just because I didn’t know my body as well back then, or that I didn’t realize the progressive nature of the condition.

During the summer after my first year at university, I began to have mysterious and intermittent episodes where I would become suddenly and violently sick. This stuff wasn’t the usual Crohn’s sickness I had been experiencing before; I’m talking about repeated vomitting for hours at a time.

The first incident began on a day when I had to work. In college I worked at a pizza joint and ran two or three shifts a week as a manager there, slapping dough, routing drivers, and counting money.

It was rainy, and as I set off at my usual time in order to make it there at 4:30pm, I felt perfectly fine.

There is a road just off the highway that was also one of the ones I took to get to work from where I was living at the time, and as I now know, the windy drive is a high point for accidents during storms. On this particular day there had been some horrific traffic incident that cause about a 5-mile police-constructed detour. With the amount of cars on the road, traffic had slowed to a crawl.

I’m groaning about being late and how this is going to look against my perfect attendance and timeliness so far (it wasn’t actually perfect, but it was close to it. If there’s one thing I pride myself on it’s being at work on time and calling if I won’t).

This was back in the days before I had a cell phone – and before they were as prevalent as they are today – so being stuck in the car taking who knows which roads to get through the detour meant I had no way to contact my boss. I was flipping out; very much stressing to the max at this point.

Anyway, on the way through I started to get a weird feeling in my stomach. It was like this moment where it just turned. Almost as if the digestive process shut down, like a huge engine getting unplugged or blowing a fuse. It was like, “hey, I can’t do this anymore!” I remember the feeling because I’ve felt it several times since, as if everything in my stomach had just turned to stone or something.

So I finally make it to work, now 45-minutes late, and this feeling hasn’t gotten any better. I went into the office and sat down, not even able to stand and take care of my normal tasks without feeling queasy. Told the operations manager what had happened with the accident and the detour and the traffic, asked him to just give me a minute to collect myself.

Some kid who I worked with suggested I go take a sit in the bathroom because sometimes that worked well on getting rid of a sick stomach. I took his suggestion, but even walking over there I had to swallow to keep my stomach inside of myself. I was determined not to throw up, not to be that kid in first grade who vomits on the lunch table in front of the whole class and then cries as he gets taken to the nurse’s office and the lunch lady gets stuck cleaning it up. I wasn’t that kid in first grade, and I wasn’t about to be that kid in front of everyone I worked with.

I make it back to the bathroom ok, shut the door, and lock it. By this point I’m sweating somethin’ awful, I mean just drenched. It’s an air-conditioned place too, and well-ventilated because of the ovens out in the main kitchen. I’m nowhere near those ovens back here, but it feels like hades. I drop trou and sit down…