Me and Crohn’s Disease
Part I: A Nervous Stomach
The vomiting began on or around my birthday.
I don’t remember now which birthday, probably eighth or ninth, but I do remember the sort of indignation that comes when you are a child whose special day has been spoiled by something mildly irritating.
Except, this wasn’t merely an irritating illness. There was vomiting, there was diarrhea, and even ice cubes came back up in the yellow bile that was the only contents left in my digestive tract. Had anyone bothered to look at that time, they probably would have found a severely swollen juncture of the small and large intestines and a white blood cell level off the charts.
But no one looked.
Over a week into my illness, as I lay on the couch too weak to stand, and with a plastic bucket as my permanent sidekick, my mother called the pediatrician’s office. I still remember the feel of our very brown, very 70s, very scratchy couch as it rubbed against my bare arms. When she tried to get me up to go to the car, I remember having a dizzy spell and wanting very much to get back to the scratchiness rather than enter any kind of vehicle and give over my throbbing head to another form of motion.
Much later, after I was all diagnosed and properly medicated, my mother would tell me that doctors for years had said I had “a nervous stomach” and that most of my digestive issues were psychological rather than physiological. In particular, she remembered this doctor’s appointment as an egregious example of the “doctor as god” who doesn’t listen to patients and underestimates their suffering because it doesn’t fit his diagnosis.
I don’t remember the appointment, which likely tells me that I’ve blacked it out in self-preservation. I remember sitting in the waiting room, a sickly yellow under florescent lights in an area with no windows. I remember the ride home, when we pulled into the drug store parking lot and I heaved open the passenger door and threw up on the pavement. What I don’t remember is the doctor pushing on my abdomen as I howled in pain. My mother remembers him saying, “Oh, that can’t possibly hurt.”
Right.
The stop at the drug store was to purchase Mylanta, which was either new to the market or new to us at the time. I’d vomited Pepto Bismol more times than I could count, so this was another stomach settler to try in the battle against my unruly stomach. My first dose was to come on Thanksgiving morning, and if all went well I’d be chowing down on turkey with the rest of the family by dinner time.
Oh, how I hated it. Mix liquid chalk with a hint of Doublemint gum, then make the sound of Drano unclogging your sink and you can approximate the experience.
But, lo. For she had taken the magic elixir and it had banished the bile and balanced the humours.
Which is just the nerdiest way I know to say that Mylanta seemed to work, and my plate was full of mashed potatoes and stuffing that miraculously stayed eaten.
Looking back now, I did have a “nervous stomach” as well. I am an anxious person at the best of times, and stress plays a huge role in the severity of symptoms. Thus, it was less the fault of the salad and milk eaten at a friend’s house than the overbearing mother that was making me eat them causing me to run for the toilet. And an anticipated test or being made fun of at school was definitely a contributing factor when I headed to the office with nausea or belly pain.
But the easy dismissal of pain and symptoms are not something I’m ready to forgive even now. It started a pattern of ignoring my body that continued on into my teen years, because I believed this was just something I was going to have to live with, and that the burden was all mine to bear.
To be continued in the next installment…
