Some of the things I’ll be talking about on my blog require some degree of contextualization. Without it, many of my thought processes will appear to be a bit disjointed if not out and out unhinged.
So, to begin…
All of my life I’ve suffered from what might charitably be called “food issues.” Not that I didn’t like to eat, but rather that my diet was so limited that my aversion to trying new foods became almost phobic.
Part of the reason behind this was that I was raised in a subculture that did not tolerate new things well. Another part was that many foods just made me ill – not ill as in a trying-to-get-out-of-eating-it way but rather in a stomach cramps for hours afterward way. Avoiding the discomfort led me to gravitate to foods I knew were safe for me which eventually led me to a very narrow diet.
By the time I was a teenager my diet was set in stone, my parents accepted it as just part of my overall character, and I can’t remember for the life of me why I never mentioned to anyone that I was in pain so much from eating.
Years went by as I made my way through high school, college, and then into early adulthood carefully picking my way around trying to minimize any discomfort I’d feel after meals. It wasn’t until I got engaged and was living with someone with a much wider palate that it became obvious what lengths I was going to to remain asymptomatic.
My entire life I dealt with recurrent bouts of diarrhea and as I went through my twenties it became more and more frequent to the point where it was all I had anymore. Between the self-imposed diet restrictions, the constant runs, and the growing frequency of the pain my then-fiancee finally convinced me to go see a gastroenterologist.
The initial visit consisted of an interview and a review of the instructions that I have to follow prior to the follow-up visit which would include a colonoscopy. Following the initial interview he said he was certain that I merely had a lactose intolerance but he do the scoping anyway just to confirm.
A week goes by, I’m back in the doctor’s office with a camera up my ass, and it’s over in about three minutes before he says he’s seen enough to confirm my diagnosis. He reiterated that I was lactose intolerant.
“But wait,” I said. “I don’t eat dairy because it makes me sick.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“But if I don’t eat it how can it be causing all this?”
He looked at me, shrugged, and said that since dairy was so pervasive in our foods it was getting in me somehow. My protestations that I barely ate anything at all and whatever I did eat surely didn’t have dairy in it made no difference to him whatsoever.
At that point I trudged home from his office through the slushy streets of Greenwich Village trying to think of all the public bathrooms along the way in case I couldn’t make it.
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