From the essay collection: French Kisses and Other Tales of Whoa!
Acid Wit: A Baffling Journey on the Road to Wellville
By Lisa Montagne, Ed.D.
August 2020
Part 1
“One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.”
Josh Billings, 1818 – 1885
Instead of having straight ear canals like most people, mine are bent. In fact, they are so like San Francisco’s Lombard Street it takes an annual visit to the doctor’s office to get them swept clean of wax. After they soak in hydrogen peroxide, the nurse calmly pumps a jolt of cold water into my ear canals, slapping my vertigo awake. I reel a bit in the chair. I reach for the counter-top to steady myself.
“Good job,” said the nurse on my last go-round. Like a prospector admiring a gold nugget, she held up one of the little wax treasures for me to inspect. “Some patients can’t handle this. They jump up and run home. Sometimes, they leave it so long their skin peels away with the wax.”
“Ick,” I replied, a bit shaken, wiping away the drips with a terry cloth towel. “Well, I’m tough. I can take it. I prefer hearing to the alternative.” My hearing had been so blocked by wax that I didn’t realize there was an easy-listening soundtrack dribbling out some Kenny G. “Huh, music…” I mumbled to the air.
I smile at this memory, knowing that I should probably post a caution sign around my neck whenever a medical professional comes at me with a scope. This nurse had it easy. There could be all kinds of freaky things awaiting the unaware around the bends of my ear canals. When I was a child, it was bacterial infections due to the after-school hours I spent in the pool as a competitive swimmer. A few years ago, a doctor found a broken bit of an ear plug blocking up my ear canal like a log in a beaver’s dam.
“Lisa,” my long-time general practitioner asked me that day, “Did you realize that you had a piece of plastic in there?” His tone had a decidedly accusatory edge.
I played dumb, even though I had suspected it. Fortunately, on this particular day, there were no awkward questions, and my ears gave up the golden bounty with little protest. I left the doctor’s office feeling brave, keenly aware of every noise in the vicinity. Even though I have peculiar ear canals, the good news is that I have the acute hearing of a fruit bat, which serves me well. Except in the theater when I can hear the lady in the back row crinkling her popcorn bag. And, when I can’t sleep because there is a clock ticking, or a person breathing too loudly. Or a piece of dust that dares to settle across the room.
Unfortunately, my odd-ball ears are also weighed down by thick inner-ear fluid that does not adapt easily to motion. As a result, since I was a child, I’ve been plagued by motion sickness and vertigo. This condition has deprived me of becoming a high-flyer in the circus. Or a fighter pilot. Or an astronaut. My dreams busted by such a little bit of stubborn goo. I envy people like my cousin Henry who flies vintage bombers as a hobby on the weekends—with an open cockpit—for fun.
One upside to being plagued by vertigo is that I am a human seismograph. As a native of Southern California, I have lived through numerous earthquakes, which announce themselves by inducing in me a wave of nausea. Maybe I should lend myself out as a sensing device to Caltech.
I had early and startling experiences with boating. My father took me on fishing canoes when I was as young as three, propping a fishing rod in my tiny hands. My mother dragged me on the slow boat to Catalina several times. She held my head in her lap. The boat captain passed by and consoled me kindly. On a high-school senior trip, I lay moaning on the deck of a sailboat begging to be thrown overboard off the coast of Santa Barbara. Since these forays never went well, I didn’t even try to go on a cruise ship until recent years. People would say, “But it’s a giant cruise ship. You won’t get sick.” They are incorrect. Giant cruise ships do, indeed, make me seasick. I’m the princess and the pea of sailors.
There is more good news, though. Motion sickness patches work. The pharmacy techs titter to each other behind their hands when I buy them, like I’m wasting money on a placebo.
“Are you sure you want them?” The pharmacy tech says, “They’re $80 for a package of three?” They always question this purchase—my insurance doesn’t cover them, but I don’t care. I like to think that motion sickness patches are at least one thing that modern medicine has nailed.
“Eighty dollars is nothing if I enjoy this trip that I’ve already paid a lot more for,” I answer in one breath. The pharmacy tech nods, silently handing them over. Before leaving the pharmacy, I want to say that I found a study in the US National Library of Medicine confirming that motion sickness patches have at least some efficacy, and I confirm their confirmation, but I let it go. Let the pharmacy techs think what they will. I feel so hale and hearty when I wear a motion-sickness patch that I want to wear them every dang day as I go about my business on land. But, alas, my general practitioner can’t—and no doubt wouldn’t—prescribe them in large-quantity, bargain packs.
Until I was 6 or 7 years old, my mother never got into the car without a towel, especially on long rides. As she settled into the passenger seat, she draped the towel across her lap, smoothing the edges, as if she were comforting the doomed linen. I’m not sure what my record was, but it was probably only a block or two from the house. In utter despair but determined, I would unbuckle the seat belt, hoist myself up on the bump in the back of my parents’ blue Chevy, and let it fly. With a practiced grace, Mother leaned aside to make way for the deluge. Don’t know why, but it comforted me to vomit on her, even when I was as old as 4 or 5.
“Lisa!” my dad would exclaim, driving down the road with one hand and wiping the other hand down over his face. “You could have warned me.” Like he had forgotten the other dozen times. But that was my dad. In those days, he was famous for military-style, forced-march family car rides from Ventura County, California, up to Modesto to see my grandma. Stops for the bathroom or food were for the weak. Buying gas was like an Indy 500 pitstop—rapid refueling and peeling back out onto Highway 5 in seconds flat. Later, he mellowed some, but when I was a child, I was expected to be a seen-but-not-heard traveler. My inconsiderate motion sickness interrupted his races up the highway. I never knew why he was in such a hurry: To get there for my grandma’s famous roast? Or was it just a young man’s fervor? More likely, it was a mundane effort to outwit traffic.
After many of these episodes, my mother was practiced at patiently folding my deposits into a towel and wrapping them into a plastic bag to be laundered later. Eventually, all trips that took us out of town required foisting foul-tasting medicine down my throat. It was sticky and yellow and tasted like I licked a car tailpipe.
“Not again,” I’d say, whining, when I saw the medicine bottle. “It’s either get this down, or we stay home,” Mother would say. I’d hold my nose while she shoved the spoon down my throat. Then they’d toss me into the back seat where I’d wallow in a drug-addled, sweaty stupor, weak tears wandering at leisure down my cheeks. I reached our destination sleepy and confused.
Since then, I’ve learned to advocate for myself. I insist on riding in the front seat of a car, which helps dampen motion sickness. Something to do with being able to keep one’s eyes on the horizon. In the early days of our marriage, my husband Edward learned this lesson the hard way.
On a drive from Oklahoma City to Abilene, Texas, he relegated me to the back seat so that our nephew could sit in front. They were listening to a silly prank radio show. As a result, we had to stop outside of Electra, Texas, on the side of the road so I could perform The Big Spit aka the Technicolor Yawn, Hunter Thompson phrases that make my husband erupt with giggles. The front seat is now reserved for me as a matter of course.
One night last winter in Orange County, an unexpected hard rain was coming down. I got soaked walking to the car. As we were driving home, I said, “Oh no. I’m not feeling so great.” In case you were wondering, I had not been drinking.
“Do you need me to pull over,” he said without blinking. It was statement, not a question.
“I’m okay for the moment,” I said, breathing in, gripping the sides of the seat. But I lost the fight. In a dark grocery store parking lot, I gave a bush an experience it will never forget.
Despite occasional parking lot fiascos, the troubled seas of my motion sickness have calmed since I’ve been an adult, especially if I wear the patches or choke down medicine. I have been known to brave sailing on a calm harbor in San Diego, and to ride the ferries to Catalina Island and Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t even mind most amusement park rides. Sure, I feel queasy afterwards, but it’s always worth it—except for the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. That was almost not worth it. It is probably the best amusement park ride in the world to-date. I highly recommend it to the non-motion-sickness crowd. It is also the most cruelly vomit-inducing park ride ever conceived.
I was pumped: As we walk in, we are in Hogwarts’ dungeons and hallways with Dumbledore greeting us visiting Muggles. As we pass his multi-storied office, the phoenix Fawkes sits aloof. Harry, Ron, and Hermione huddle under the Invisibility Cloak. The Sorting Hat crankily hurries us along…Then, bam! They strapped us into a dangling, harnessed seat. Then, boom! They strapped virtual reality visors on our heads, like we were hostages in a spy movie. And we were off! Riding a broom around and above Hogwarts, over the lake and the forest. What little I could make of it looked amazing.
The ride is a combo of being whizzed around in a blender while watching fast-motion scenes on-screen. Shortly after we took off, I had to squeeze my eyes shut and clamp down the blow hole of my very being, praying I might be allowed to live until it was over. I emerged legless and green. If this is what Regan in The Exorcist felt like after having her head practically spun off by demons, then I experienced it in reality that day. I was utterly regretful that I couldn’t enjoy it fully. Every middle-aged girl dreams of flying a broom over Hogwarts. It started out sooo cool. It was the reason I shelled out the dough for the skip-the-line passes that day. Stupid thick inner-ear fluid.
Despite the discomfort of vertigo, I am marginally comforted by the fact that I do not suffer alone. Vertigo is nothing new, out of the ordinary, or particularly dangerous (usually). It is one of many genetic flukes that humans have always had to cope with—like milder forms of the common cold and the fact that vegetables are not quite as satisfying as a hunk of butter on bread.
The literature recording bouts of seasickness goes back thousands of years. Even before the explosion of literacy and medical texts in the 20th century, everyone from the ancient scholars in China, Greece and Rome to 19th-century sailors have written about it. It has been a steady theme through the ages. The famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and the Italian statesman Cicero both wrote about it. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, complained that on one voyage he suffered so badly that “he could bring nothing more up.” Seasickness is certainly a great leveler, no respecter of class or gender. As 19th century American humorist Jose Billings wrote, nausea has its wily way of humbling the proudest of persons.
Seasickness has even affected the course of history. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the admiral in command of the Spanish Armada in 1588, was so thrown off his game by seasickness that his performance in naval battle was clearly less than stellar, resulting in defeat. But among the military set, he was hardly alone. Even the British Admiral Nelson reported that he experienced seasickness for his entire life, naval hero that he was. And here I am in the 21st century with the pharmacy techs giggling at me, as if all we have after thousands of years of complaints and medical advances is a placebo.
Apart from motion sickness intruding on my peace, my stomach has been a fussy monster all on her own almost since I was born. Episodic, chronic stomach pain has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember. It has been a long, exhausting road figuring out what appeases that grumpy gorgon.
My father, an avid fisherman who toughed out his motion sickness for the sake of his passion, used to say that we were just born this way. Basically, he was telling his daughter—his only child—to “man up,” and to accept what I cannot change, which is not terrible advice. The Serenity Prayer is on point in many ways.
On the journey to determining what optimal health feels like for me, I have learned many things. For example, the hand that nature deals us, such as misbehaving inner-ear fluid or a fussy stomach, are part of the game of living. As we all must, I am forced to accept and to bet on the hand that I’ve been dealt, just like the great Hippocrates, Seneca, and the Duke of Medina. Among this venerable company, I am hopeful yet nevertheless cautious as I decide whether to hit or to stand at the blackjack table of life.
For the most part, I have learned to live within the limits set for me by the DNA lotto. For example, I am quite short, which poses a number of challenges. I must hem all my pants. I must climb to reach dishes. I am overlooked as an insignificant little lump everywhere from the deli counter to the conference room. People are frequently surprised by what I can do. I’ve heard many times, “Lisa, I didn’t imagine that you could…”and fill in the blank: create costumes, decorate a home, sell real estate, build shelves, use an electric saw and drill, cook, host elaborate parties, organize large events, DJ dances, perform Argentine Tango and Swing dancing in front of audiences, write and perform poetry, paint watercolor and oil landscapes, read music, set up a home Internet network, command a classroom full of students, train faculty in educational technology, run a college learning management system for 25, 000 people, get a doctorate degree while teaching a full load of English composition classes, write essays….The extent to which people underestimate me always catches me off guard. As if ability has anything to do with size, age, gender, or any other surface classification.
In addition to what nature has dealt me, I can also catalog a host of other minor annoyances common to most people in the sedentary 21st century: I have to stretch and exercise daily or stiffen into stone. I have to endure pain in my hands and back from computer work, artwork, sewing, cooking and so on. I get tri-annual migraines that can last for weeks. And since I have a metabolism that moves at the pace of a banana slug, I am at war with abundantly available calories.
But like many people, I also face more serious challenges. My 23 and Me DNA health report listed diabetes as my number-one health risk, confirming what I already knew. Mr. Diabetes has already claimed the lives of my mother and brother. It’s still some years until I’m the age when they both died of heart attacks, a common outcome of diabetes. So, I’ll get back to you on this in like 2028—or not. Only sassy Miss Time will tell. As I write this, my heart scans are clean, and I do not host Mr. Diabetes. No, thank you. Move along, Mr. D. The door is not open to you here.
If I had not been born in the late 20th century, like so many of us, I would have already been dead long before Type II diabetes could get me. Without the modern miracle of antibiotics (thank you, Alexander Fleming), I might have keeled over from any of the following things by now: complications caused by getting the chicken pox at age 25; bronchitis, pneumonia, and other assorted lung complaints; and infections due to injuries such as hacking my toe with a rusty garden hoe when I was 16. Not to mention that without modern drugs, I would have hemorrhaged to death in childbirth at the age of 20 in the same way millions of women have sacrificed themselves for the survival of the human race. And that would have been that. As it happens, I am still here to endure a growing list of dangers. I have to stand naked as swarms of interns remove suspicious-looking moles and mount constant vigilance against the most vicious of foes, bladder infections. And then there are my old friends, the twins, Depression and Anxiety, who make house calls on their own schedule without my consent. Damned idiots.
In 2020, despite our challenges with a global pandemic and the U.S. government careening off the rails, if given a choice between living in 1920 or 2020, I still choose 2020. If I had to be born woman, I am extremely lucky to have been born in the late 20th century. In California. For this handout of fate, I am truly grateful. But while the great body of medical knowledge has come a long way in a relatively short time, to which I owe my very life, some of humanity’s most complicated medical puzzles are still yet to be solved. When it comes to surviving and thriving as a species, humanity is still probably only about two-thirds up the Road to Wellville.
Part 2
“I say of the Mother or wombe…finding itself annoyed by some unkind humor, either within itself, or in the vessels adjoyning or belonging unto it, doth by natural instinct, which is ingrafted in every part of the body, endevour to expel that which is offensive.”
Edward Jorden, The Suffocation of Mother, 1603
Of all that I face as a modern human, my chronic stomach pain has been the most challenging. Many days, the pit of my stomach feels like it’s being agitated like a load of laundry. Or being stabbed at by a myriad of tiny fairy people wielding knives. Lacking a definitive diagnosis, I was almost driven insane by my stomach condition. Supposedly Kurt Cobain, who suffered from chronic, undiagnosed stomach pain, was too. In 1994, at the time Cobain offed himself, the medical professionals did not know what caused his condition. They did not know what caused mine, either. Sometimes while yelping out the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I imagine that Kurt and I shared our condition. Obviously, there is no way to prove it, but the notion makes me feel less alone.
For decades, my brutal stomach, a cruel but necessary goddess, maddened me. She rears her ugly monster head every chance she gets. It’s not like I can remove her like an appendix. “Ha! You can’t get rid of me!” she taunts. But despite contemplating it, I never got to the point of suicide. I learned to live with my stomach’s peculiar condition for a long, long time—without the help of doctors, or anyone, for that matter.
For decades, when it came to my stomach complaints, everyone from significant others to family members, casual acquaintances, and even doctors frequently told me some version of that it was “all in my head.” Or I got royally preached at by health nuts, or conspiracy weirdos who tell me it’s the fault of the modern, industrial-food complex. According to them, I should be able to eat garlic, but somehow that I can’t is the fault of pesticides, GMOs, or some such theory. Modern food production, also a necessary but cruel god, is definitely a complicated character in the current human drama. But it’s still not the culprit I’ve been looking for all these years.
In the mid-1990s, one doctor told me if I ever came to see him again, he would not accept my pitiful teacher’s insurance or even take my hard-earned cash. After a colonoscopy confirmed that I didn’t have cancer, he concluded that I was just trying to get attention. He actually said that. He wasn’t that kind of doctor, so he sent me on my way. I’m pretty sure he ended our last consultation with “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.”
By the way, I endured that colonoscopy entirely awake because my insurance didn’t cover being put under—talk about an experience in patience and self-control. The long view back to how colonoscopies were conducted in 1994 seems very long, indeed. As long as a human colon. The procedure took about an hour. I watched the entire thing on a television screen. The technician narrated the cinematic journey up through my rectum and into the wonderland that is my colon. On that trip up the River Colonoscopy, I failed to see the tiny, fairy people wielding knives, which would have finally made some sense. To add insult to injury, those cheapos didn’t even provide popcorn or other movie snacks, which would have helped.
For decades, the way in which “helpful” people saw my symptoms was akin to the historical diagnosis of female hysteria. Through the millennia, the vague diagnosis of female hysteria has gained a surprising amount of traction almost to the present day. Of course, propounded on heavily by the male-dominated medical profession.
In ancient Greece, complaints filed by females to physicians were frequently attributed to a refusal to honor the phallus. In the Middle Ages demonic possession was the go-to diagnosis. But in 1603 Edward Jorden held the enlightened view that female complaints were not, in point of fact, caused by demon-possession. No, siree. They were caused by a wandering womb that went walk-about in the female body until it was able to expel “that which is offensive.” In fact, this wandering womb theory became a new catch-all medical category. That she-devil apparently got up to all kinds of mischief, causing “monstrous and terrible symptoms such as suffocation in the throate, croaking of Frogges, hissing of Snakes…frenzies, convulsions, laughing, singing, weeping, crying.” Jorden also made a connection between physical symptoms and “perturbations of the minde” that caused women to suffer from and even supposedly die of “joye, griefe, love, feare, shame” and other such “madnesses.”
Although it is difficult to see the wandering womb theory as progress, it kept women from being burned as witches quite as often. However, Jorden’s “theories” do highlight how women who express perfectly normal emotions, such as joy and grief, are even today often ridiculed by men as being in some way “crazy.” In conversation with all stripes of men—even with my nearest and dearest—I have heard this phrase countless times: “Oh, but she’s crazy.” They say this when offering a reason for everything from why a couple broke up to why a woman needed to go on medical leave. It seems to be an ingrained knee-jerk reaction among many men of my past and present acquaintance, even though they may regret their flawed reasoning post-haste.
By the 19th century, there was a pervasive assumption that so-called hysterical females just needed a husband to give them “strong and vigorous intercourse.” This was purported to heal a raft of illnesses. Trust me, if sex cured my stomach woes, I would have been plenty cured in my 20s at the height of such activity in my life. But, alas, here I am, stomach woes still a constant challenge. C’est la vie.
After spending a lifetime of having people—some more subtlety and others with more vigor—toss out easy, overly-generalized platitudes like physicians in a Victorian women’s sanatoria, forgive me if I’m skeptical of the underlying themes. Those themes can be summarized as follows: If I just ate certain things or if I simply behaved in certain ways or if I just got a good rogering, all my troubles would be over. Although I realize they were trying to help, I felt swatted away like an annoying fly. I did not feel heard or seen, just like poor Kurt. Poor me.
While the causes of motion sickness are more obvious—such as…well, motion—for decades I knew there was something more going on with my stomach. I longed for a diagnosis that made some kind of sense. With each passing year, my stomach has behaved more and more like a weather barometer. My stomach tells me “No” when conditions are nasty. Tomatoes? No. Hot sauce? Never. Coffee? Absolutely not—are you insane? Red Wine? Noperino. Sometimes, my stomach rejects meals just for the sport of it. Beets a la vinaigrette? Not today, thank you.
And, every time I vomit, I always think that I will never do that again. I genuinely believe it. But so far faith in my stomach holding fast has not worked out for me. While I have long since stopped vomiting on virtually every car ride, I still vomit 5 or 6 times a year—my stomach is not in the least bit interested in my feelings on this issue. And, no, to those of you who are ready to toss some easy platitudes or explanations my way, I am not anorexic nor an alcoholic, nor do I have any kind of emotionally charged “food issues.” And the blame cannot be put at the feet of the modern, industrial-food-complex gods. Although, they do have much to answer for despite trying to feed the world, such as the pervasiveness of refined sugar in every god-damned thing. No, in truth, for most of my life, it has seemed as if my stomach simply has a mind of her own. Maybe Edward Jorden should have written about the stomach rather the womb as the culprit for so much inexplicable health trauma. It certainly feels as if my stomach goes walk-about at will. She’s definitely in league with the rest of my system. In fact, if I get above a certain weight my stomach says, “No way, lady!” She simply rejects most food for weeks at a time until she strikes a bargain with the bathroom scale. While some may think, “Cool! A built-in weight watcher’s system,” I beg to differ.
When you think about it, inserting foreign substances into the body through the mouth hole is an odd thing to do to begin with. No wonder she’s annoyed. How would you like it if someone dumped random things on your head all day? So, my stomach is a bossy little bitch. She demands that I weave my days around her wishes. She won’t leave me in peace until I’m in balance as she sees fit. But, more often than not, like a television soap opera villain, she is mean just for the hell of it.
Part 3
“The Heart-burn is an uneasy Sensation of Heat in the Stomach, occasioned by Indigestion, which is the Mother of Gout, Rheumatism, Gravel and Stone. To prevent it, Eat no Fat, especially what is burnt or oily; and neither eat or drink anything sour or acid. To cure it, Dissolve a Thimble-full of Salt of Wormwood in a Glass of Water, and drink it.”
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, 1756
Suffering from my type of stomach condition causes more than just a bit of heartburn and the occasional stomachache. There is more. Much more. Some of the symptoms include cloudy lungs that precipitates a nagging, dry cough, and persistent nasal drip and congestion. Vertigo, nausea, and vomiting assert themselves at the most inconvenient of times. There is my personal favorite, bone-numbing exhaustion that feels like coming down with the flu. If it’s bad enough, I am forced to stay in bed for a day or two, staring at the walls like a sleepy sloth. Red wine brings on the worst of the latter symptom; it renders me practically paralyzed. I was forced to give up red wine more than a decade ago after I spent a rousing weekend with close friends in Scottsdale, Arizona. They kept the pinot noir flowing like a golf course water feature, but I paid a heavy price. No red wine has passed my lips since that fateful weekend.
After that initial colonoscopy in the 1990s revealed no answers, I began to doubt myself. However, what I knew for sure is that the corridor of symptoms is long. Everyone may experience that walk differently. Occasional annoyance lingers near the beginning, while terminal cancer lay in wait at the far end. Symptoms in the middle hover somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The middle of the symptom spectrum seems to drive doctors up a wall. It’s like the conundrum of this familiar romantic relationship scenario: If we’re not just friends and we’re not married, what are we to each other? If I’m not your cancer doctor, then what am I to you? I’m sure under their professional exteriors, they want to scream. At least in the late 20th century, those doctors weren’t trying to burn me as a demon-possessed witch or tell me that my womb would eventually expel “that which is offensive.” Although that one jerk did tell me I was crazy. As I said previously, the hysterical female theory still has some pull. And, sorry, Poor Richard, our dear Dr. Franklin, wormwood in a glass of water just doesn’t cut it.
Besides the symptoms listed above, I have had one additional, stubborn a-hole of a symptom almost every day of my life. This symptom, along with all the others, was mis-diagnosed by doctors for a good 20 years with their sights simply aimed at the wrong enemy: allergies. I understand perfectly well that many people have allergic reactions caused by a skewed immune system response. They react poorly to everything from dust bunnies to delicious bagels, but I am not one of those people.
Even though I have tested negative on all allergy tests since I was a child, doctors have sent me packing with allergy medications anyway.
“Well, maybe this 100-plus-item battery of tests that includes every substance and food group known to man just doesn’t cover what you’re allergic to,” said one doctor in the late 90s. He tossed me a prescription for fexofenadine, a common allergy medication. As a good girl who does what I’m told, I took it as prescribed. Once again it made no difference to my symptoms. Let’s start near the beginning:
When I was in the 8th grade, I started waking up with a sore throat. Every. Single. Day. At first, my mother kept me home from school because she presumed it was a virus. I was a kid, so I had no idea what was going on. All that I knew was that I felt like crap.
“Mom, I don’t feel good again today,” I would croak many mornings. When I was in elementary school, she may have chalked up my whining to an excuse for avoiding awkward school-yard politics. But I had grown into a mostly socially competent tween. And I was consistent in my complaints—for months on end.
As the sore throats were clearly not caused by a typical cold or flu virus, which should recede—or kill a person—within mere weeks, my mother began to look elsewhere for answers. An active Christian until the day she died, her first line of defense was always prayer.
Holding my two hands in hers, she touched her forehead to mine. She prayed, “Lord, please heal Lisa’s throat this morning.” Although I continued to suffer, I would screw up my courage, ignore the pain, and get myself off to school. That morning prayer was all that I had for a quite a while. Thank you for that, at least, Mama.
I grew up in semi-rural Ventura County, California, just north of Los Angeles. We had ample access to healthy, fresh food not only at grocery chain stores like Vons and Albertsons, but also at roadside fruit and vegetable stands. Orchards, farms, and produce fields dotted the county. I was an adult before I realized that not everyone in America can get fresh strawberries down the block year-round.
My father was a college professor who specialized in horticulture, domestic animal husbandry, and equine science. Due to his professional connections in the agriculture industry, he purchased and stored a side of beef in our freezer every year. A roast once bounced off a freezer shelf and broke his left, big toe. Doh! He also taught us to grow some of our own food. We tended tomatoes, kale, cabbage, mint, onions, and other vegetables and fruit in our backyard. An ag man with a doctorate degree who grew up in Modesto, California, in the era of American Graffiti, he was a kind of contemporary gentleman farmer. Think Harrison Ford, Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfus blended into one, real person. Like George Lucas, my father went to Modesto J.C., the real-life junior college featured in the movie, before going on to greater things.
As my father monitored the fat green caterpillars that treated our kitchen garden as a personal bonanza, I watched as he plucked them off the plants.
“Ewww…,” I muttered, backing away. The caterpillars, frustrated by capture, wriggled between his thumb and forefinger. He held one closer to my face.
“What?” he said in his best Harrison-Ford-Indiana-Jones voice. “Nothing to be afraid of. They are going to be butterflies one day. You like butterflies, right?”
“Yesss…” I said, shakily. I always tried to be the boy he never had, but I had my limits.
“But you have to get them before they get yours,” he declared. When picking them off the plants, spraying the plants with soap, and whatever other farmer magic he tried had failed, my father’s will to fight the pests in a civilized manner snapped. After loading up a batch of those green worms into a bucket, he took them inside and heated a pot of water on the stove.
“Oh, my gosh, Don! What are you going to do?” my mother cried, covering her face with her hands. Gentleman farmer or no, there was a Modesto street-racer streak of danger in my father when he was young. It boiled over when under the right kind of pressure.
“Eeeek!” I screeched when he plopped the caterpillars one by one into the boiling water, like tiny, green lobsters. They tumbled and curled into a green soup. For the life of me, I cannot remember why he did this. I scoured the Internet to find a reason but came up empty. The trauma of The Great Caterpillar Boiling has buried my father’s motivation deep in the undergrowth of my psyche. Did he lay their boiled bodies out in the garden as a warning, using them as fertilizer, like so much Soylent Green? One thing I know for sure, that day my father showed Mother Nature who was boss of our backyard.
Despite access to wholesome food, my chronic illness grew worse. I continued to have post-nasal drip, a dry cough, and sore throats every day. My mother continued to look for answers to my problems and hers. Only in her early 40s, her complaints included weight gain, bloating, a sluggish thyroid, and arthritis. These were probably early signs of the diabetes and heart disease that were her final undoing.
When I was in junior high school, my mother and I lived with my cousin Karen who is 5 years my senior. I am the youngest of my generation. The three of us moved into a new condo development in Thousand Oaks. Our previous house with the vegetable garden was gone. My father sold it. Until my parents finally divorced when I was 17, he left us several times for a mistress. This was one of those times. The new condo had a small, covered porch, but no place to grow food.
So, my mother began exploring a new trend called “health food.” Whole Foods had yet to begin its formidable march across the land. What are now mainstream expectations for organic, pesticide-free, non-GMO food production was born out of a grass-roots movement with Southern Californian hippies in the vanguard. Good for you, hippies! You won that fight, and then some: See the current definition of hipster, farm-to-table restaurant.
But in those days, we had to hunt down the alternative food sources. For a nominal monthly fee, we joined a local health food co-op housed in a small warehouse. It looked like a giant storage locker. It had one of those pull-down garage doors at the front. There were long banks of cold food storage, produce bins made of packing cases, and sawdust on the floor. The whole place was probably off the grid for all I know.
The health food co-op was only open a few days a week. Every Thursday afternoon, mother, Karen, and I went after my mother got home from work. We bought locally grown organic fruit and vegetables; raw milk, kefir, and yogurt from I-don’t-know-where; and nut butters freshly ground behind the counter.
The hippies who ran the co-op were friendly and enthusiastic. As a burgeoning tween, I especially admired the bright-eyed, tanned and muscled young men with their silky, long hair and beards. They stocked the shelves and ran the cash register, often sans shirts. Hello, boys! In those days, as So Cal tween girls still do, I unselfconsciously wore tiny t-shirts under tight-fitting cotton hoodies and cut-off jean shorts with flip flops. If those young men admired me, too, I certainly knew nothing about it, but the smell of compost and sawdust are reminiscent of my tween sexual stirrings.
In addition to health food, at the co-op we were also introduced to the burgeoning industry of vitamin supplements. This delighted my mother to no end. To her, the vitamin aisle was a fantasy land. During her relatively short life, she succumbed to almost every sales pitch she ever heard. She was always searching for quick-fix solutions for everything from her melancholia to her annually increasing waistline. She was certain that each and every new thing was the answer to her prayers.
“Ooooo, look at these!” she would coo. “These are supposed to cut appetite.” So, in the basket they went. She stocked up on a fat bevy of jars containing a range of pills from folic acid to vitamin C. She cleared out an entire kitchen cabinet shelf for her cure-alls, and the larger the collection grew, the more my father (when he was around) would shake his head and stare at his diminishing checkbook balance.
Vitamin C, the go-to, cure-all of the time, was purported to heal head colds and sore throats. So, with my mother’s encouragement and hopeful that my sore throats would soon be a thing of the past, I took a large, oblong vitamin C pill each morning. I ate organic rice cakes slathered with almond butter and raw honey. This breakfast was an upgrade from enriched chocolate milk and blueberry Pop Tarts. After a few months of this regime, my sore throats persisted, and my stomach aches actually grew worse. I despaired.
My mother widened her search for answers, and we landed at the doorstep of a celebrated doctor in our area. While he held an MD, he was considered progressive because he embraced nutrition as a means to healing. He also pointed a large finger at allergies. That was my first round of allergy tests, which were negative. The revered doctor diagnosed me with food sensitivities anyway. I was just 13 years old. He suggested that I cut out sugar, wheat, and dairy. Although my sore throats did not go away completely, my change in diet made a bit of a difference. I took going off sugar especially seriously.
That visit to the allergy doctor piqued my curiosity big time. I ran across a book by William Duffy written in 1975 called Sugar Blues. It was a detailed history of the sugar industry. You can still find copies on Amazon, although I expect that its officially out of print. The impact of that book on me was profound. Its thesis held that refined sugarcane has only been a pervasive ingredient in the human diet for about the last 100 years. To my mind this easily explains the current flourishing diabetes epidemic. Did you know that a Coke has 30 grams of sugar per can? That’s about how much sugar you should eat in a week.
Of course, the intervening science has proved Duffy right. From the perspective of 2020, it is hard to remember that at one time people considered sugar to be a part of the healthy food pyramid.
I remember my aunt saying, “But you need sugar in your diet for energy.” She huffed when I refused to eat her homemade pie. With rare exceptions, for a good 30 years I did not eat refined sugarcane. Of course, my family and my friends thought I was crazy. This commitment meant that I drank no sodas. I ate no cakes, pies, cookies, or candy. I was an obsessive reader of ingredients labels. I wouldn’t eat cereal, bread, bagels or even salad dressing if the sugar content exceeded more than 3 grams of sugar per serving. I tried my best never to eat any refined sugar or corn syrup at all: not on Christmas, not on my birthday, nor even at weddings, including my own.
Today, I will indulge in the real thing now and again at a high-value event such as a wedding or at high-tea, one of my very favorite rituals in life. But taunting the evil Mr. Diabetes usually just results in whanging headaches that remind me that I do not produce insulin like a normal person. This runs deep in the DNA of my family. If I hadn’t stopped eating sugar so young, I’d be on my way to the same fatal fight with Mr. D that my mother and brother had. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that I am still grateful for my encounter with that famous doctor. He did not, however, heal my sore throats or my stomach woes.
In 9th grade, I started attending a private Christian school that was founded by our Evangelical church. After I had missed a day, which was rare, or when I complained about a sore throat or an acute stomachache, the principal and head high school teacher would invite me into the office for another round of prayer.
In the early days of the school, the office had a glass wall. Everyone could see everything in there. Talk about transparency. I even saw a kid get paddled once—with a long, wooden flat instrument, rumored to have been specially whittled for this purpose by a church member who worked as a carpenter. I’m sure he took pride in his work. Jesus was also a carpenter. Although I never had any direct experience of it, paddling was occasionally meted out during the length of my school years in the 1970s and 80s. This was especially popular at private schools where that sort of thing was left up to the judgement of the venerable private sector.
In the front room of that office, the principal formed a small, tight circle comprised of the school secretary (who was also his wife), a teacher or two, and me. It must have been a peculiar sight, a living tableau—a ring of adults holding hands with a student in the middle of the workday.
“Lord,” the principal intoned, “Please heal Lisa’s throat and stomach this morning. Please bless her day, as she studies….” It wouldn’t surprise me if they, like so many others, assumed I had some sort of emotional problem manifesting as a physical symptom. If they did, they kept it to themselves. They meant well. They were earnest. There was no harm in it. I definitely felt like they cared, helpless though they were to do anything more about it.
Then one day it hit me. Without the help of my sincere, but often hapless mother or any other adults, I figured it out. It was the vitamin C that was worsening my condition and not making it better. There was no Internet or easy access to medical information of this sort, so I went with my gut, so to speak. I quit taking the vitamin C pills, and the acute stomach aches went away—for the time being. The acid in the pills had been irritating my stomach lining. I didn’t know it then, but I was onto something. However, it would be decades before I cracked the problem of my sore throats or figured out why the vitamin C made my stomach worse.
Part 4
“To silence a Cock. If you should wish that a cock should not crow, anoint his crest with oil, and he will be mute.”
Rhiwallon Feddyg, The Red Book of Hergest, 1382
When I was in college, I worked as a waitress for a trendy Southern California restaurant chain. I mostly had lunch shifts between classes, but for stretches of time that lasted months, I was a cocktail waitress in the bar. It was so crowded on weekends that people were stuffed in wall-to-wall like drunk sardines in a can. I waited on Lionel Richey more than once because he lived in that neighborhood. He came into the bar early in the evening, had a beer or two, and wisely left long before the worst of the crowd poured in. He was a bright spot in otherwise hellish shifts that lasted late into the night.
People pulled at my long hair and tripped me. I was pinched, shoved, and sometimes offered sums of money to go to hotel rooms with male patrons. Not Lionel Richey, by the way, who always a pleasant gentleman.
Sometimes I heard “Hey, honey, wanna party?” in passing. Usually I was solicited by well-dressed businessmen who used more subtle tactics than the garden-variety lout. I became deft at stringing them along with good service and smiles—equivalent to anointing their crests with oil to render them mute—until I could snatch my tip away. If they persisted, as politely as I could reasonably muster, I was forced to tell them and their crowing cocks to take a flying leap. And that was just the customers. I was also asked out at least once a day by one male co-worker or another. I even was accosted by one who grabbed my chest from behind while I was doing prep work in the kitchen.
One night as I was making my way through a dense knot of people, someone deliberately tipped a full tray of drinks out of my hands just to see it fall. Some nights were so crowded and wild that my anointing-with-oil strategy was useless.
“Hey!” I exclaimed in surprise and frustration. The bar was so dark that I never got a good look at the person who committed the truly heinous crime of recreational tray-tipping. I don’t remember a face. Only a pair of hands and the malicious deliberate intention of the act. Looking down at my wet, sticky shoes and the smashed glass, I rolled my eyes in exasperation, knowing that my shift was screwed. I would be behind, yelled at by the manager for the lost revenue, and otherwise abused by customers whose drinks were dashed to the floor. Needless to say, this could be a stressful job. I rarely slept well in those days. After those shifts in the bar, I’d get home at 3 am, my clothes and hair reeking of cigarette smoke and restaurant-grade fry oil. My mind would race until 6 am, when I had to get up for early morning classes and do it all over again. This period of my life, about seven years, lasted through my bachelor’s degree, teaching credential program, and years of substitute teaching.
One December 24, the restaurant management decided to throw a Christmas party for the employees, payment in kind for our grinding work throughout the year. The Long Island Iced Teas, fruit Jell-O shots, and trays of cranberry vodka shooters were on the house. “Whoo hoo!” we all thought.
Considering my sensitive stomach and diminutive size, downing two glasses of booze was a very big night for me. But in those heady days, I occasionally indulged in some stress-relief drinking. It had been a hard fall semester. And the drinks were free. Free, I tells ya.
I can also defend myself with the fact that alcoholic concoctions combined with herbal extractions have been considered medicinal—even good for the stomach—from ancient times to the Middle Ages. In fact, 13th-century alchemist Roger Bacon believed in alcohol as a treatment for its ability to “preserve the stomach, strengthen the natural heat, help digestion, defend the body from corruption, [and] concoct the food till it be turned into very blood.” I mean, who am I to argue? Alcohol turns food into blood! Today, there are constantly conflicting reports. Most of them land somewhere in the middle of the debate with some dictum along the lines of alcohol is good for you in moderation. Salud!
Although I was more inclined towards collecting college degrees than prostitution, I readily admit that the overall arc of my life has been steered in general by the crowing of the cocks. I have followed the male stream through the barn yard of life, sometimes ending up outside the safety of the farm. However, this time, on that December 24, the fellow in question wasn’t someone I liked—he liked me. He was a tall, wiry line cook, white trashy in a Dax Shepherd or Jeff Foxworthy kind of way: fair-haired and handsome but not really my personality type when it came down to it. He was one of many in the restaurant who sought me out. So after I had released the tension of the fall semester by knocking back many more than two drinks—probably, let’s say, one Long Island Iced Tea, two beers, several vodka shooters, and a few Jell-O shots, laden with sugar that definitely piled on the bad effects—this guy swooped down like a rooster making a grand entrance in the hen house. He even handed me a couple of more shooters on his way down to make sure his prey was rendered completely senseless.
“Oh, god,” I moaned, after downing the last one. I realized that my mother had driven up from Los Angeles to spend Christmas Eve with me at my brother’s house where I was living at the time. She was waiting at the house while my brother, my sister-in-law and their two daughters were out at Christmas Eve services.
“I can’t drive…I can barely stand…” I probably slurred like Barney on The Simpsons.
“It’s okay. You can come with me,” said the Jeff Foxworthy dude.
“To where?”
“To my place. It’s not far, then I’ll bring you back for your car in the morning.”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
“I know…so?”
“My family is waiting for me.”
The argument continued as I stalled to think it through, albeit slowly through the haze of alcohol. Getting a ride from this guy seemed a better option than calling my mother—who had never seen me drunk. And I definitely didn’t want her to see me with this random guy, much less on Christmas Eve. And she wouldn’t have been thrilled that I left my car at the restaurant. There was no taxi service in that area. Such things as smart phones and Uber were long in the future—not that I could really afford such luxuries at the time anyway. Actually, and let’s just keep calling him Jeff, I think Jeff meant well enough. But, if the opportunity should present itself, he was ready to strike at this particular hen. What to do, what to do…. I finally relented and agreed to let him drive me home—and nowhere else.
True to type—and this is not embellishment for narrative’s sake—Jeff had a beat-up pick-up truck so rusty around the gills that it didn’t look like it could make it around the corner, much less the few miles to my house. The other employees had dispersed by then, and the restaurant lights had been dimmed and the doors locked. There was no longer access to a phone. A few streetlamps cast their glow down onto the street but otherwise the area was abandoned. The Southern California winter coastal fog was rolling in. I shrugged it off. My choice had been made. As I recall it, he heaved me onto the cracked-leather passenger seat like a sack of potatoes.
“There you go,” he said, as he piled me in, taking the opportunity to hold me around the waist a little too long. He patted my behind for good measure.
Outside the truck, the world was starting to spin in slow circles like the starry night in Van Gogh’s painting. Inside the truck, I was having a difficult time figuring out which way was up. On that night, it was definitely the alcohol causing my physical turmoil. To give Jeff directions to my house, I needed to see where we were going. Remember, no GPS. And people generally didn’t have paper maps on hand either, so merely reciting my address would be of no help to him.
“Oh-kay,” he sighed as he tried to sit me upright on the passenger seat in my rag-doll state. “Tell me where I need to go.”
“Ugh…gosh darn it!” I swore, using stronger language as the spinning got worse. But I managed to grab at the truck’s windowsill like a puppy ready to stick her head out the window. All that a passerby would see through the window was the top of my head and my two dark eyes staring in despair out into the night.
Propping myself up with a death grip, I croaked out the directions: “left,” “now right,” “pass through this stoplight,” etc. Blurg. After what seemed like an hour-long, perilous trek through Mirkwood but was only a 10-minute drive over perfectly paved suburban streets, we pulled up in front of my brother’s house. The fog was thicker by then. It was difficult to see across the street, the wandering tendrils of moisture adding a dramatic touch.
“Thank god,” I uttered, my breath creating a foggy patch on the truck’s windowpane. I’d made it home.
“Let me get the door for you,” said Jeff.
“Nah, it’s okay. I got it.” I fumbled with the door handle. The door pushed open with a mighty creak. So much for making a stealthy entrance.
Hearing the truck outside, my mother’s face appeared in the window. The front door fell open as I tumbled out of Jeff’s truck and onto the lawn.
“Thanks,” I said hastily, waving him away like an elderly rooster destined for the stew pot. I set my full intention on making it to the front door with my purse intact and without wobbling into a bush. Ahead of me, a beacon of domestic safety, my mother was lit up in silhouette like a Madonna in a painting. I followed that welcoming path of light to the warmth of hearth and home.
After I got out of Jeff’s truck, I never looked back at him. Despite his sketchy agenda, I felt an odd gratefulness to him, an out-of-whack knight in denim armor on a rusty steed. I hadn’t even reminded him to be careful as he drove home in the thickening fog to his empty apartment on Christmas Eve. I don’t think he stayed with the restaurant long after that. At least, this is the only real interaction I remember with him. He probably thought I was just another crazy bitch, but in my view, I successfully rendered his cock mute—blocked it, if you will—and got home safely on Christmas Eve.
“Hi,” Mother said, as she ushered me through the door. “I thought you would never get here. I could have gone to church.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said, hugging her. “I’m here now.”
“Who was that guy? Where’s your car?” Rallying, I ignored her questions. In my room, I peeled off my smelly, sticky work clothes and took a quick shower. The ceiling was still spinning when I made my way back into the living room.
Mother was ready to move on to more important things. “Look!” She pointed out the many gifts she had put under the tree. She loved lavishing us with gifts at Christmas, always so proud of herself. My brother could be a curmudgeon about her excesses, grumpily chiding her that his kids didn’t need more stuffed animals. His house overflowed with Grammy’s gifts, which she bestowed on the grandchildren for every holiday, birthday, and mere visit. Personally, I was thrilled with her Mrs. Santa Claus act—nobody has ever had an eye for gifts like my mother. Christmas has never been the same since she passed.
Trying to pluck up some appropriate enthusiasm, I plonked myself down on the chaise lounge, bone weary, thirsty. The room continued spinning, now counterclockwise. Variety is good.
“Wait, honey…” Mother scrutinized me more carefully when my reaction to her tour of the Christmas tree was lack luster. “Are you drunk?” I had always been so strait-laced. She had never seen it before.
“Maybe a little,” I confessed, starting to sweat. “There was a party…” I started to explain, the queasiness surging. I rubbed my temples.
“That’s…um, different,” she said, sort of laughing. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk. My little baby is all grown up!” It was a novelty she found almost cute. “Anyway, look at what I brought Amanda…”
As she continued her litany of gifts, I observed her as if she were at the end of a long tunnel. The light dimmed. The sound muffled. I was aware of her taking a seat on the couch, chatting away about her drive up from L.A., the gifts…what I might be cooking for Christmas dinner the next day.
As I struggled to hear her, I noticed that the gifts I’d wrapped for my nieces had been shoved behind a planter. I got up to rearrange the holiday horde, but the act of rising, bending, and rising again proved to be the last straw. While my mother may have found my condition amusing, my stomach was extremely unhappy. She was going to let me know quite firmly that I had crossed the line. Too much booze, too much sugar. It was untenable.
I stood there frozen before the Christmas tree, finding it difficult to breath. The lights danced before my eyes. Then, in a rising tide, my entire fall semester, and all past semesters, and all the prior trauma of my life came pouring out in a stream…of projectile vomit…all over the Christmas tree.
While this was clearly not the first nor the last time that my stomach gave up her contents outside the privacy of a toilet, it was—you must admit—the most spectacular. I mean, come on. On the Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve. In the history of my stomach woes, I call that Christmas Eve out as the winner of the Technicolor Yawn contest. The Biggest Spit of Big Spits. My stomach had made it to the show to use baseball parlance. She would never repeat quite such a spectacular feat.
While my mother was often a self-absorbed and quirky soul to be sure, she was also a truly loving and forgiving saint in many ways. She helped me clean up the mess well enough not to spoil our holiday. She sent me to bed with like a gallon of water without so much as even the tiniest of scoldings—just like when I was 5 years old and leaned over the car seat to use her lap as a landing pad. She still remembered exactly what to do. God bless her.
My friend Alicen loves to recount the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, which was December 10, 1999. Alicen and I were having some vodka sodas in her loft apartment while making Christmas tree ornaments. In our buzzed state, we were so proud of the ornaments, ambitiously planning a sales kiosk down on the mall. You know, like ya do.
Normally in those days, especially if I had to pay for it in a bar, I would have one vodka soda and be done. I would nurse that sucker all evening. But in a private home with an entire bottle at my disposal, I started to lose track. Plus, I spilled at least one, which I refilled, sooo…I’m not sure how many I downed that night. As the night wore on, I tried to be festive, keep up the merriment. Not think too much about my mother. But it had only been a year since I’d lost her.
Later that night, I once again did not make it all the way to the toilet. I don’t know what I was thinking by that point: that is was too difficult to bend all the way down? I aimed it at the bathroom sink instead, only one foot from the toilet.
“And Princess Lisa,” said Alicen for many years afterwards, “was too good for the toilet. She used the sink like a diva!”
To be fair, Alicen did clean it up. While she continued to call me Princess Lisa for at least a decade after that, Alicen, who became a therapist so it was kind of her job, also compassionately accepted that I may have overdone it precisely because it was the anniversary—the first anniversary—of my mother’s death.
Other notable occasions when my stomach made her rage known in plain sight include tableside when I was out on a date in a fashionable Sausalito restaurant, in a trash receptable outside a movie theater in Los Angeles, in a New Orleans French Quarter parking lot (I think a cigar on top of some absinthe sent me over the edge that night—my bad), and on countless freeway shoulders in front of various friends, family members, significant others, and any passerby who glanced in my direction.
Part 5
“The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; these make up the nature of the body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. He enjoys the most perfect health when these elements are duly proportioned to one another….and when they are perfectly mingled.”
Hippocrates, 460–375 BCE
It is by now obvious that I have lost my cookies regularly over the course of my life. Over-doing alcohol was the culprit about half a dozen times. More often, it was elicited by motion-induced dizziness or the specter of vertigo that visits me for weeks or months at a time. Or the weather changing, or an increase in the sales tax. But the root cause of spending a lifetime being sick, as the British say, was largely a mystery to me until quite recently.
For much of my life, it seemed as if my stomach did not like me. To this day, she remains a delicate flower who relishes in her hothouse sensibilities. She is a demanding diva who will have my attention or else. Plus, there were those grinding sore throats, sometimes so bad that I wanted to cut my head off. Less harsh on the stomach than aspirin or ibuprofen, I have often masked that pain with acetaminophen, aka Tylenol. Or, paracetamol, as the British say. By the year 2000, I was losing my patience with deprivation and hippy remedies. I needed more answers. With my mother gone, I soldiered on alone.
As Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen report in Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, the stomach has been treated with every en vogue remedy from literally blowing tobacco smoke up the ass and leaches snacking on the blood to the ingestion of calomel, “the treatment of choice from the 16th to the early 20th century.” Calomel, a fine, white powder that resembles cocaine, is a mixture of mercury and chlorine. It was prescribed by doctors at will until a little over a century ago. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was given a mercury compound to treat the typhoid fever she contracted during her Civil War service. She complained of it bitterly, as it had long-lasting detrimental effects on her health. Ya, think?
Of course, calomel is a poison that made people foam at the mouth, produce black stools, and vomit. But, as the theory of humors went, a body must purge out the bad to be in balance—even if the cure was worse than the illness. The foaming, pooping, and barfing were considered signs that the medicine was doing its job. Compared with these treatments, laudanum, morphine, and cocaine were improvements, not to mention a lot more fun. Still, the idea that the body should be in balance is not such a bad one. Hippocrates was on the right track in this regard, although how it was achieved in the past has been nothing short of ghastly and downright deadly.
During the late 1990s, after doctors did little to shed light on the cause of my stomach pains and sore throats, I would go on a diet of water, herbal tea, and homemade millet-and-rice muffins for months at a time. I gave up wheat and dairy again. I had long since given up tomatoes, peppers, and most spicy food. To this day, I dearly miss salsa with my tortilla chips. I exercised a lot. I ate nothing but spinach leaves for days. I even tried a new-agey, all-liquid cleanse. This regime helped some, although I was mostly stabbing in the dark, occasionally stumbling on something to appease my she-monster of a stomach.
In the year 2000 I met my husband Edward. During the dating, wedding planning, and honeymoon phase of our relationship, my eating habits varied wildly. By late 2002, I was chronically ill with the same old problems. As I was getting longer in the tooth, my condition was getting worse, more debilitating.
“Huh,” said Edward, “My allergy doctor is the best in Orange County. Why don’t you go to see him?” That old chestnut. In addition to being asthmatic, Edward has a boat load of allergies. When he takes allergy tests, the results light up like the 30 Rock Christmas tree. His number one allergy? Wheat. Poor guy. As per usual, I was desperate, so I trotted along to his celebrated allergy doctor anyway. I mean, what could it hurt? And once again, a comprehensive battery of allergy tests showed bupkis. I was still, in fact, not allergic to one damn thing. Not dust bunnies, not rag weed, and not one kind of food. But this time, instead of packing me off with fexofenadine and shaking his head, this doctor looked me square in the eye across his desk and said, “Tell me your symptoms again.” So, I did: vertigo, stomach aches, episodic (and epic) vomiting, nasal congestion, tightness in the lungs, sore throats.
“I wonder…” he replied, looking thoughtful for a few moments. If he had had a goatee, he would have stroked it. Then, he opened a desk drawer and handed me a book, which had been released just the year before in 2001.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a look at it.” ‘Cause why not. I’m nothing if not open-minded. I went straight to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy. In the privacy of home, I didn’t put that little book down until I had read every word. For the very first time on this journey, I felt seen! That book got me! It just took over 20 years of my lifetime for the medical profession to catch up, and for someone in the medical field to step up. To me, that little book was a miracle.
Called Tell Me What to Eat if I Have Acid Reflux by Elaine Magee M.D., that book was about a condition called acid reflux, or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Since 2001, literally dozens of books have been ground out on this topic, but in the decades prior to the year 2000 information about GERD languished in medical journals beyond the reach of ordinary people. And Google was yet to be the best friend of the ambitious self-diagnoser.
Magee described my symptoms to a T in a way that the allergy, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and stomach cancer pamphlets tossed at me in the 1990s never did. I obviously do not have allergies, I clearly do not have cancer, and I do not have IBS, which causes “bad humors” to expel themselves out the bottom. Nope, that is not me. To balance my humors, I’m more of an up-and-coming-out-of-the-top sort of gal. As much as I tried, I could not see myself in the failed diagnoses of doctors until this book parted the clouds of despair for me. More than anything, this life-changing little book confirmed that I was, in fact, not crazy.
At this time of enlightenment, I emailed a former boyfriend to let him have it. I needed him to know that I was, in fact, not crazy. I hadn’t spoken to him in several years, but he was one who really got my goat. He attributed my stomach woes to “emotional issues.” Naturally, he never replied to my email rant. What else would I expect? An apology in sky writing? Still, sometimes a gal just has to get something off her chest even if it is just to the great digital void.
That little acid reflux book was my Bible for several years. Giving up tomatoes, peppers, and other acidic foods in the mid-90s had been the right move. But I definitely gained new insights. Oatmeal is supposed to be good for you, right? Turns out nyet. It is not only acidic, but it also expands in the stomach, opening the bottom of the esophagus to let the acid ride up like trouser floods on an ‘80s nerd. Peppermint is supposed to soothe the stomach, right? Also, a no. It burns the top of the stomach lining. And sugar turns out to be one of the most acidic foods known to humankind. I knew I was right about that evil monster. I was vindicated. Take that, pie-making aunties. And, Mr. D, you can suck it.
Put simply, the physiology of acid reflux (GERD) involves the opening at the top of the stomach, called the upper esophageal sphincter (UES). This bundle of muscles opens and closes like a gate to let food and drink pass from the esophagus into the stomach. However, if the little devil relaxes too much between meals, acid streams flow up like hot lava from the River Hades, creeping up into the esophagus and the lungs. This caused the nasal congestion, dry cough, and tightness in my lungs that I could never explain and that doctors assumed were evidence of an allergic reaction. Starting from age 13, what I really needed was a pamphlet thrown at me called So, You were Born with a Weak Esophageal Sphincter. If I’d been armed with this knowledge in the mid-90s when that first gastroenterologist blew me off, I could have told him that he could kiss my sphincter.
There is another important factor here. In addition to dumping acid into our systems, some people simply produce too much acid to begin with. It turns out that I am one of those people. I have an over-achieving stomach. She wants to earn an A for digestion at every meal. Apparently, the opposite can also be true—some people have overly alkaline systems, which causes a whole other raft of problems to sail downwind.
Since this acid-factor revelation, people have still tossed all kinds of suppositions and theories at me. Laying the blame on modern food production is still a go-to favorite. These people insist that what I have is a wholly contemporary problem perpetrated by the man to keep the little guy down, but I call bullshit. People have suffered from acid reflux since we crawled out of the primordial soup. A weak esophageal sphincter is another one of those genetic imperfections like thick inner-ear fluid or snoring. Acid reflux has been called by many names throughout the millennia, including dyspepsia and heartburn. Clearly Dr. Franklin was interested in finding an 18th-century cure. Of course, he did, that naughty man. He loved to party. He probably gulped down rivers of red wine in his day, especially during his diplomatic, epicurean days in France.
Today, I recognize symptoms of GERD listed in the medical literature with a high level of personal understanding. These include the dry cough, post-nasal drip, chest congestion, nausea, and vomiting that I have experienced for so much of my life. One of my favorites in the laundry list of symptoms are “tympanites.” This is when gas causes the abdomen to distend, resembling a drum. This stomach not only wants to be an over-achiever at digestion, but he also wants to contribute to the percussion section of the orchestra. Another favorite is “shifting dullness,” an accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity. Sounds familiar. Like a wandering womb, maybe? Only actually a thing?
Apparently, acid reflux/GERD symptoms vary widely in people. But no doctor has explained this simple insight to me. In fact, my current gastroenterologist, another “famous” doctor (who happens to be a real-life “McDreamy,” a fact he is well aware of), can explain the mechanics of acid reflux well enough. But doctors in general are still woefully lacking in explaining the big picture. They need a class in medical school called How to Explain the Big Picture to Patients. For example, until a few years ago I actually could not feel the acid riding up my esophagus. Not at all. I did not experience “heartburn” in the classic sense. I never could tell the doctors why, exactly. Perhaps due to my attempts at eating a better diet than most? Maybe because I’m a small person, not particularly obese? But I did exhibit many of the other symptoms that were so gravely misinterpreted as allergies. How was I to know?
In 2002, the concept of GERD finally gave me some much-needed peace of mind, but I was still not out of the acid woods. After seeing that allergist in 2002, I went to the next gastroenterologist (the guy prior to Gastro McDreamy) who was the first medical professional I met who knew anything about GERD. He gave me my first endoscopy, a coming-of-age event for every blushing gal to remember. This involves a camera down the throat, something that definitely requires sedation. It’s a comfortable little nap, much preferred to being fully awake and aware of the cinematic journey up my colon. By then, I was in a position to get better treatment. What’s that line that Kathy Bates delivered on the big screen in Fried Green Tomatoes? “I’m older and I have better insurance?” I saw her in person once, standing in front of the The Ivy Restaurant in Hollywood. I respected her space, not daring to say hello. I contented myself with observing her super-chill vibe. I bet she knows how to handle herself with confidence in a medical crisis.
My first endoscopy showed that I had a mildly inflamed esophagus and a small hiatal hernia. Again, thankfully, no cancer, which can be lying in wait at the end of the GERD hall. I was prescribed a medicine called pantoprazole, which is a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) that reduces the production of stomach acid. Chemists in Europe studied pantoprazole as early as 1985. But drug development and trials move like a constipated iceberg. This is probably a good thing. At least we aren’t regularly poisoning people with mercury and chlorine anymore. But I spent decades suffering physically and emotionally because this drug took decades to seep up into medical practice here in the U.S. That’s just the fact of the matter. And who knows how I would have been treated more than a hundred years ago—hanged as whiney witch, had smoke pumped up my butt, dumped into an asylum for hysterical women, dosed with calomel? Maybe I would have just pulled an Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, filled my coat pockets with rocks, and let myself float down the River Colonoscopy into oblivion to join Kurt Cobain on a gently rocking wave beyond the reach of chronic illness.
Introduced to the U.S. market in the year 2000, pantoprazole was, and still is, very expensive. In 2002, insurance paid for it only for a few weeks. When they cut me off, I cried. I felt betrayed on the brink of a whole, new life. I slunk off with my tail between my legs, thinking that the insurance experts must know what they are doing. What can I say? I was still relatively young and dumb. I definitely felt powerless.
Truthfully, the insurance company was following the recommended guidelines of the time that pantoprazole should be used only as a two-week, short-term therapy. Of course, a few weeks of PPI therapy didn’t do the trick to reverse and heal decades of messiness. Disenchanted, I wrote in my diary at the time: “It may well be that I don’t over-produce acid.” When I could no longer get the pantoprazole, I was prescribed a prescription-strength famotidine acid-reducer instead, which my 2002 diary claims gave me headaches. So, I made do with Tums, or nothing. I was still clinging to the hippy notion that the more “natural” a remedy is, the more morally superior. I was still not seeing the situation clearly enough.
Although my stomach was better for long stretches with a lower-acid diet, my sore throats persisted. I still didn’t know what caused them. And nobody else could tell me, either. This was not a symptom emphasized in the GERD literature that I had access to at the time, or if it was mentioned, I didn’t make the connection. My general practitioner told me: “You just naturally produce a lot of post-nasal drip that’s going down your throat, which causes irritation. It’s just the way you are.” He was implying, like my father did all those decades before, that I was born this way. He prescribed an allergy medication, which I believe is still listed on my medical charts. Hoo-ray. I ignored it. I knew it wasn’t right. But I was at a loss. I hit another dead end. So, I struggled on, dragging my slightly improved stomach and irritated throat kicking and screaming through another decade, plus, of life.
The latest breakthrough came in the summer of 2018. After a long stretch of sore throats, I had a meltdown. A genuine freak-out, which is unusual for my long-suffering temperament. My latest round of sore throats was so bad that I took to my bed. I wallowed, my head adrift on waves of pain. After my pity pontoon languished on the shores of the Slough of Despond, I mustered energy for another round in the self-care ring.
My general practitioner gave me a course of antibiotics in case I had some kind of throat infection. When that didn’t stamp out my sore throats, I went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor (ENT) to explore other causes.
The ENT was a friendly guy who made a refreshing change from Gastro McBlow-off and Gastro McDreamy. Incongruously, he came at me aggressively with a scope. To be fair, he did give me a slight warning:
“I like to go for it and have it over in a jiffy,” he said. “Okay?”
“Ah, yeah, okay?” my voice squeaked up. “Wait, what is happening…?”
Then boom! That scope flew up my nose and into my throat. Slip and slide! Just like that.
It was actually over in a damn quick jiffy. ENT McFriendly said, “Yep. That there is a classic acid reflux sore throat.” He may not have sounded like a country bumpkin, but it feels right on this page.
“Say what now?” I said. “Would you repeat that?” He repeated it.
“Wow? Really?” I was stunned. If I wasn’t already sitting on the examination table, I would have fallen over in shock. I’d never fully made that connection before. And nobody else had ever made it for me. Huh. Acid reflux causes sore throats. It turns out that since I was 13 years old, the acid had been quietly creeping up into the upper part of my throat while I was sleeping at night. No wonder I was unaware of it. I was unconscious while it happened. I sat there stunned for a moment.
“But,” ENT McFriendly continued. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. There is no evidence in the current literature that says it causes throat cancer or anything.”
“But I’m forced to take a lot of Tylenol.”
“It’s a pretty innocuous drug.”
“I’ve been suffering from this since I was 13 years old.”
“Well,” said ENT McFriendly, “Now you know.”
“Is there anything I can do about it?”
He said that PPIs help some people, but they have to take them consistently for a while, like for many months, sometimes twice a day. Well, well, insurance company. What do you have to say for yourself now? I thought.
Okay, so this was one of those middle-of-the-road symptoms that might not kill me, but it had caused me a lot of pain, suffering and self-doubt for most of my life. By then, I had more confidence in my own problem-solving abilities, so I wasn’t about to give up there. What next?
I circled back to Gastro McDreamy to report the ENT’s opinion about my sore throats. “Oh, yeah,” he said, sort of offhand, as he sank back onto his heels and ran his hand through his luxurious hair. “GERD does cause some people to have sore throats.” Geesh. You could give a gal a heads up. He suggested yet another endoscopy. But this journey was extra special.
By 2018, the future was finally here. During the procedure, they clipped a little gadget the size of a thumbnail to my esophagus, making me a cyborg for a weekend. It was soo cool. I bragged about it to everyone I saw. For four days, I wore a monitor pack the size of a small purse that measured the acid content of my stomach. I had to stay within a few feet of the monitor even in the shower. But I could see my stomach’s reactions in real time.
I spent the weekend researching the acid content of foods. By then Google was my close research companion. I experimented. Milk? Neutral. Margarita with lime juice. Not so neutral. In fact, quite acid. That should be obvious, but it was interesting to witness the monitor numbers fluctuate with my food and drink intake.
After spending a weekend as a cyborg, Gastro McDreamy reported that I had “milder” acid fluctuations than most. Of course, I did. I was stuck in the middle of the symptom road again. Grrrr…If my symptoms are mild, I cannot begin to imagine what people with severe GERD must go through. Cannot. Even. Imagine.
However, the endoscopy did reveal that I had Barrett’s syndrome, which is a cluster of tiny pre-cancerous cells at the bottom of my esophagus. So, 18 years after pantoprazole came on the market, Gastro McDreamy was able to put me on a PPI indefinitely. In fact, if I lapse taking it for more than a week, the nausea, vomiting and sore throats pounce. They are always lying in wait, ready to frolic with wild abandon. Fortunately, long-term use of PPIs is no longer verboten if the patient takes magnesium supplements and has an endoscopy every five years. The insurance company still does not give a crap. Luckily, one pharmaceutical company, actually the good guy in this case, gave me a coupon that I still use to this day, reducing the cost of pantoprazole from $80 to just $20 a month, an easy price to pay for health and sanity.
Still, my sore throats did not vanish magically into the night like so much mist. I went back to ENT McFriendly. I went back to the Gastro McDreamy. They both basically shrugged. I wasn’t dying of cancer any minute, remember? Gastro McDreamy did not want me to take the PPI twice a day; ENT McFriendly did. So, I lighted upon this idea—by myself with no help, thank you very much—that I should take the PPI at night to combat the Acid Night Crawler.
“You can give it a try,” said Gastro McDreamy, looking casually stunning in his scrubs, his flawless bedhead flouncing gracefully.
So, I did. And according to Google, there was one more thing that I could try: Buy a very expensive bed.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that almost everyone on my mother’s side of the family was born with this genetic weakness: a weak esophageal sphincter. It makes sense. We all have soft mid-sections that range from slightly pudgy (me) to obese (giving up no names—my family will read this).
From puberty, my brother had chronic congestion, post-nasal drip, and a dry cough. His presence in a room was announced by constant throat clearing. My mother always called his condition “allergies,” and so did my brother. He coughed and snuffled his way through life until diabetes and heart disease won out in August of 2018.
In early 2000 or so, my Aunt Marcia had surgery for esophagitis, something that I did not connect with my own problems at the time. The surgeons repaired a hiatal hernia and “sewed her esophagus back together,” according to my diary entry. Now 89 years old, Marcia suffers from Alzheimer’s. So, old habits die hard. A Southern-bred girl to the end, she douses her dinner in Louisiana hot sauce, drinks day-old coffee out of the carafe, and tops it all off with a whiskey sour. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She might as well be chugging battery acid. Then she screams in pain all evening and begs for ice cream, which does combat the acid. Dairy products can be beneficial for some people.
My cousin Karen is the closest person I have to a biological sister. All her life, she has also suffered from the same symptoms I have—from the nausea and vomiting to the sore throats—especially the sore throats. Back when Karen lived with us, my mother also took her to the famous allergy doctor. He diagnosed her with “food sensitivities” as well. So, for decades, Karen has always claimed to have allergies to wheat. For many years, I also claimed to have allergies. Even though I knew it wasn’t accurate, it was just easier for people to wrap their minds around when I politely declined the acidic and sugar-laden food on offer. The get-out-of-jail-free allergy card saved me insulting many a hostess.
During the summer of 2019, my cousin Karen and I took a short road trip from Austin to Dallas, stopping in Waco, Texas. What the heck is in Waco, Texas, you ask? Besides Baylor University, a medium-sized zoo, and broken-down old main street? Why all the Chip and Joanna Gaines “Fixer Upper” sites, of course, which include their Silos shopping district, a to-die-for breakfast café (we had to get up at 5 am to get in line—the breakfast biscuits alone are worth it!), and many other renovated houses and businesses that have been featured in the hit HGTV series “Fixer Upper.” Yes, Waco is now a bona fide tourist destination, and a fun one at that. Even through the pandemic, the Gaines have been unstoppable, pumping out their successful Magnolia magazine, producing a housewares line for Target, expanding their retail commons, and renovating a historic Waco building into hotel. Needless to say, I’m a fan of the busy Gaines clan.
In Waco, Karen and I stayed in a small shot-gun house renovated by the Gaines, which we found on Airbnb. It is walking distance from The Silos. We were having morning tea in our sleeping shirts and panties, watching the episode of “Fixer Upper” that featured the very house we were sitting in. A tour bus pulled up out in front of the little house. We waved. The people in the bus waved back. We could have been in an episode called Fixer Upper Special Edition: A Very Meta Morning.
One night in Waco, Karen and I were sitting in a bar, one of the hipster places sparked by the Waco “Gaines-assance.” A few younger men flirted with us middle-aged ladies, something that still happens to me everywhere but in California—an idea worth unpacking some other time.
When we weren’t chatting with the locals, I was telling Karen about my latest ventures into curing my sore throats, including my new adjustable bed, a split California king. What is a split king, you ask? There are two mattresses side-by-side on separate, adjustable frames, but you can put a king-sized duvet over both to look like one, large bed. With a remote control, I can whiz up and down on my own side of the bed at will. Sleeping on an incline keeps the Acid Night Crawler in his place—trapped down in my stomach where he belongs. Sleeping partially upright, along with taking the PPIs at night, was the final piece of the puzzle that I so desperately needed. A few months into this regime, et Voila! My sore throats were finally gone—most of the time.
Halle-freakin’-lu-jah! I had finally unlocked the secret door that led to a sore-throat-free life. On the other side of that door, the sun was bright and the fields green. Wildflowers greeted me with a cheerful “Hallo!” (The flowers sound British in my head, like in a Wordsworth poem.) Finally, I could breathe in the fresh air of living pain-free.
“But” Karen insisted, “that doctor we went to when we were kids said it was allergies. I swear to you that my sore throats are caused by wheat.”
“That may be true for some other people,” I replied, laying my hand on her shoulder, “but not for us, my biological relative, not for us.”
Mildly perturbed, she turned back to her hipster drink, handcrafted by the mixologist behind the bar. We changed the subject to her love of South Korean dramas.
I saw her next at Christmas 2019.
“Well,” she said. “I was determined to prove you wrong.”
“Um,” I said. “Okay?”
“I wanted to prove that you are wrong about the Acid Night Crawler,” she explained. “So, I started sleeping with a backrest. Then, I invested in one of those adjustable beds. It turns out you are right. Now that I sleep upright, I no longer, after decades, have sore throats in the morning.”
I nodded my head once slowly and emphatically in reply. I probably said something like I told you so, but who’s keeping track?
Much of what I know today in 2020 about my health, I have pieced together based on experience, stumbling upon the correct literature, and interpreting—sometimes with great difficulty—the tidbits that doctors eek out to me in drips and drabs. But more than anything I have learned to advocate for myself. Nobody else knows how I feel in my body. Nobody is going to do the hard work for me. While I most certainly listen to my doctors, in the end only I know what is best for me.
Again, Hippocrates was right about one thing: the body should be in balance—he just had no idea how to go about it. At least for me, balance means keeping the acid-to-alkaline ratio even. To achieve this, I must do a lot of things every day, including but not limited to the following:
- Avoid acidic foods
- Drink water with a Ph score of 7 or higher
- Take probiotics
- Drink apple cider vinegar concoctions
- Take PPIs and magnesium supplements
- Not eat after 6 pm
- Oh, yeah, and sleep on my super-neato bed
It was also with great sadness that I had to break up with my beloved morning cup of Earl Grey. We triste now only on special occasions, making the encounters all the more tender and special. I am now having a steady affair with an acid-free tea made from dandelion root, and a coffee substitute made from chicory and carob. To add a much-needed morning kick of caffeine, I blend in acid-free, Japanese ceremony-grade matcha green tea powder. Everyone who hears about my proprietary drink blends thinks they’re weird; anybody who’s tasted them thinks they’re delicious. Well, almost everyone. I enjoy them and they don’t upset my stomach. That’s what matters, right?
Based on my roots in a backyard garden and hippy health food co-ops, I still firmly believe that everyone should start as “naturally” as possible in the search for health remedies. Most of my health regime does consist of “natural” products. But, please people, do not judge those who need prescription medicine. Sure, maybe big pharma over-peddles drugs we don’t really need. But, many people, including myself, depend on the right ones for the right reasons. Pandemics aside, humans enjoy healthier, longer lives compared with most of the poor sods who lived before antibiotics and vaccines precisely because of scientific breakthroughs in medicine.
Admitting that I battle so-called heartburn daily is a little humiliating, like I’m a gouty, old-timey man in a powered wig, old Ben Franklin stooping over his tincture of wormwood. But I can tell you that acid reflux/GERD is not for wimps, especially for those who end up with aggressive esophageal cancer. Knock on wood for me. By the way, my last endoscopy showed no current signs of Barret’s syndrome. And remember, I was born this way: with stubborn inner-ear fluid and a weak esophageal sphincter. Yes, Lady Gaga. I was born to be brave. And so is everyone else. I leave you with this: Don’t give up. There probably is an answer to whatever problem it is that you face today. Just because your doctor doesn’t know what it is doesn’t mean that she won’t someday. I have faith in the scientific community. I absolutely do. I owe it my very life, as do most of us. But it isn’t perfect. Breakthroughs in scientific knowledge has always been in a recursive loop and always will be. You may just have to wait it out, like I did. In the meantime, keep looking for answers.
On your journey, keep in mind that everyone is different. As Titus Lucretious Carus said in the 1st-century BCE: One man’s meat is another man’s poison. For example, recently turmeric has been all the rage for reducing inflammation. I thought, well, it’s worth a try for keeping my sore throats at bay. It’s turns out to be a giant “Nope!” for me. Turmeric opens the flood gates of the acid river. It even had the temerity to do it in broad daylight, not even waiting to collude with the Acid Night Crawler. So did glucosamine chondroitin, the cheeky bugger, which is also supposed to reduce inflammation. Like aspirin and ibuprofen, turmeric and glucosamine chondroitin are acid compounds. If they work for you, congrats. But please do not insist that they will work for me. So, tread gently. Be kind. I offer up advice to others with reticence—except to my cousin Karen, ‘cause I’m the boss of her. My next stop on the experiment highway? I’m going to check out all the H. pylori hype. Maybe it will be the next great discovery for me. It’s still a journey. Hope to see you, too, on this Road to Wellville.
END
For the historical and medical facts, I do have end notes and references that need to be cleaned up and made presentable.
