When I got home, needless to say my then-fiancee wasn’t impressed by the diagnosis.
She’s never had much regard for medical doctors and reflexively distrusts them, but I still placed a pretty unquestioning faith in them and proceeded to try to live with my “lactose intolerance.”
As the years slowly passed I became, out of necessity, a living guidebook for locating all available public bathrooms in New York City. Trips out and about or just running errands had to be planned so that we’d always be near a pit stop.
My diet became more restricted as I desperately tried to limit whatever sources might be contributing the mystery lactose that was making me so constantly sick. Foods that I loved – fresh corn on the cob, for instance – would only be eaten once a year because of the excrutiating pain for hours afterward.
All this time my by-now wife would insist that there was something wrong and shake her head as I’d deny it and say things were managable.
My disposition had always tended to the blunt and surly end of the spectrum and things only got slowly worse and the constant pain I was in (and for some reason denied) soured me even further.
Finally, things had gotten to the point of being so uncomfortable for me that I insisted we move out of New York City and into the country in the hope that the peace and quiet and relative lack of stress would help me feel better.
It didn’t.
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