waves

the nausea comes in waves.

the tingling is everywhere but concentrates itself in the back of my neck.

the tremors start in my gut and radiate out through my shoulders and into my legs.

i walk.

i walk a path into the floor.

i walk to keep from vomiting.

i walk to keep the tremors from shaking me to pieces.

and all because of some eggs.  or milk.  or an insipid ingredient in the bean-o that i didn’t notice until after i’d chewed up two chalky pills: cod.

this was last night.

i’m still out of sorts.  i can’t get it out of my system.  one lousy mistake and now it will take days to reset my system to digest again.  it will take days to reset my psyche to sleep again.

it will take days.

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Chickens and Eggs

Yesterday, for the first time in two weeks, I ate a piece of chicken.  A little tiny piece cooked in nothing but no-stick nuthin’ spray with a little salt and pepper.  And, guess what?

Chicken tastes just like egg.

I’ve never noticed it before.  But after weeks of bland food and no meat or dairy, I am now acutely aware of tastes.  For example, most water tastes horrific.  I can feel every foul tasting mineral sliding down my throat.  Oh, I gulp it down anyways (fast and cold and there’s less taste) but it’s not enjoyable.

And, now, thanks to my little blue pills, I can eat chicken.  Chicken that, I suppose not surprisingly, tastes just like egg.

And why, ask you, is this my first chicken in weeks?

Well, let’s just say that after months of stomach aches and nausea and then weeks of worsening stomachaches (and, ahem, farting.  go ahead, giggle, damn it.) and the inability to eat pretty much anything (which meant I basically stopped eating), I ended up in the ER with an ugly stomachache, nausea and heart palpitations coupled with a mild panic attack about the fact that I was dying through either something in my stomach or just the fact that I was slowly starving.  The nurse even rolled her eyes at me.  Thankfully, I wasn’t the craziest person there, though, because the lady after me was insisting that she’d been poisoned through the air ducts and her mom explained that she was also hearing voices.  I hope she got a bigger eye roll than I did.

In the end, I had a nice nap in a very well lit room (okay, a fitful half-sleep while my eyeballs were being burned by the glaring fluorescent overhead), covered in heated blankets and hooked up to some much-needed saline (hydration is goooood) while they ran all sorts of tests on the many vials of blood sucked out of my miniature veins.  And the end result?

Drum roll please:

Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

I am now officially part of a fifth of the US population who can claim the disease.  Go me.

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