When I was 13 I started getting very severe heartburn. I was lucky to have a father very familiar with acid reflux to notice the symptoms and show me the bottle of tums. After one especially notable spaghetti dinner, where my chest hurt so much that I cried, I finally let my mother set up a doctor’s appointment for me.
Because my father had acid reflux, and the average time of onset is early teens, that’s what the doctor diagnosed me with. He suggested that I change my diet (hard when you’re 13) and keep some tums handy. When Pepcid AC (the first preventative heartburn drug to hit the over the counter market) came out the doctor told me I should get into the habit of taking it an hour before I eat anything that gave me heartburn. He also told me that surgery was an option if the heartburn continued to be “makes me cry” bad.
All through high school I carried around Pepcid AC and had a pocketful of tums, I just got used to it.
After I left home I stuck with it, when I lived in NY same thing. But while I was living in NY another stomach ailment showed up, lactose intolerance. I’d always had trouble with dairy (I had already cut back on it when I was younger because they thought it had something to do with my migranes), but this was a real stomach problem with it, gas and upset stomach. I decided to limit my dairy intake even more.
Then I went to a friend’s father’s birthday and had a delicious steak. I was sick for 2 days.
Then I went out with another friend to get a Rochester “burger garbage plate.” I was sick for over a day.
Wait, I see a pattern here, my stomach has problems with beef! Looking back there are more times when I can see that’s what caused whatever sickness I was having, but it’s with these two that I finally made the connection.
When I moved here to Philadelphia and moved in with Michael I cut all beef and pork from my diet. We began eating healthier, cooking our own food. We still ate out often and a bottle of rolaids followed. But then we started not eating out so much. About 4 months ago I realized that the same bottle of rolaids had been in the bathroom cabinet for months, that’s unheard of! I used to go through a bottle every few weeks. I was feeling so much better not having heartburn so often that I even stopped my 10 year habit of carrying around anacids everywhere.
I felt so good that I started eating pepperoni and beef again. Boy did I miss pepperoni pizza, and steak? MmmMmm! I missed steak. It seemed like things were going good, I was feeling good, and expanding my diet felt really great.
Slowly I started taking more anacids. On New Years I got some really bad heartburn when I was drinking. This friday my heartburn was almost enough to ruin my night, and with too much dairy on top of it I was forced to go to bed. Now I’m back to getting heartburn a few times a week! Damn it!
So it looks like I’ll need to go back to my no beef or pork diet again. Giving up pepperoni and steak once was hard, doing it again… sigh. I have a vegetarian cookbook that I got from my parents, a lot of grain-based meals that I might want to try out. I need to avoid too much dairy and too much soy as well, since both give me stomach problems when I eat too much of them.
I hate my stomach.