It's Just Abbey

So Health Care reform! You know what that means! Time for Abbey to talk about her various ailments!

Okay, in the last few entries I have referenced my stomach of doom. I feel the need to explain because, well, I will be talking about my tummy a lot. It is a large part of my life and hangs out with me when I don’t want it too. Like a TV sitcom little sister but we rarely sit down, hug it out and I agree to include her more.

Let’s start with the beginning. When I was in high school I found myself oddly full of burps. I would sit in math class during tests and little burps from nowhere would come up. They typically arose when I was stressed and for some ungodly reason I was always sure they were silent. Yeah, not so much. I wonder why I was never popular.

Then in college my little burping problem evolved into loud and inconvenient burping, stressed or otherwise. It was so frustrating. I would burp when I was full, hungry, kinda hungry, not hungry, pretty much anytime. And it was college so I soon discovered being under the influence of alcohol made it worse. Beer in particular. Nothing to be concerned about right? WRONG!

I did go to the doctor with slight pains and he asked my diet. I told him my usual college, dorm dwelling diet. I mentioned that I was a fan of eating chicken wings while watching Adult Swim. “Well there’s your problem! No eating chicken wings after midnight! Thanks that will be $10,000!” So there you have it, I’m a gremlin. Case closed.

One night while in the dorm with Phedre and my then boyfriend, let’s call him AssFace (btw my now ex-boyfriend), I keeled over in wild abdominal pain. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think and I was crying like a little girl lost in WalMart. Phedre and AssFace carried me to the car and we were off to the hospital. Once I got there they started asking me a million questions while I was bent over sobbing. I was actually convinced my appendix had burst and they were asking me about my sex life. Jesus. I was pissed off and the famous exchange that happened that night was after the nurse asked me if I was addicted to any street drugs I ran my hand under my nose, snorted loudly and said, “Nope,” in my best crack addict voice. The poor girl looked horrified.

After that, since I am a girl between the ages of 15-30, I must be pregnant. That pain was clearly either a miscarriage of an ovary exploding. Now, I didn’t get an awesome grade in biology but when the pain is just under my ribs I am pretty sure my lady parts are not involved but I’m not a doctor, what do I know? Either way I got the happy pills and was laid down to sleep it off. But I of course resisted them and tried to stay awake and mumble random things. “I think that if Abe Lincoln ate Pop Tarts he would go for the strawberry. Without frosting. Lincoln doesn’t need all that raz-mataz on his Pop Tarts” and yelling at the nurse for not having yellow sharpie markers.

This is where things get fuzzy. I blacked out and kept waking up to terrible things. Remember, I went in with raging stomach issues and professed this loudly. I woke up with my legs propped up in stirrups, a towel over my legs and metal in my cootch. I looked down and a handsome young doctor peeked up and said, “All looks good down here,” and gave me a thumbs up. A THUMBS UP! Like he was checking my oil level in my car. All I could say was awesome and pass back out.

Then I woke up in a different bed and a woman was holding a giant phallic thing/probe and she was lubing it up. “Don’t worry, it isn’t as scary as it looks.” Oh, well that is okay but… hey! Where are you planning to put that in? Noooooo!

That ultrasound machine owes me dinner.

Surprise surprise, they found nothing wrong. I went through a thousand tests. I swallowed a gallon and a half of barium, x-rays, CAT scans, and all kinds of fun things. Guess what they found? Nothing. Everything in my body was in tip top shape. Oh joy.

I went to checkups where my doctor would press on my stomach, point at my belly button piercings and say, “Well there’s your problem! Metal Toxicity!” Hurr hurr hurr. What the hell is wrong with me, bro!? This isn’t funny! At one point they said I had ulcers and gave me two antibiotics. One that caused insomnia and one that caused severe fatigue. Let me tell you about a hellish combo of side effects. Also not to mention the fatigue causing one made everything I ate taste like nickels. Blech.

Jump ahead a year to me being unable to keep food in my stomach and losing weight fast. Same thing, different year. Guess what? “Oh, well that sliding hiatal hernia you have is acting up again.” My what now? Oh yes. It seems they had diagnosed me with all kinds of things but didn’t tell me or help me. They didn’t tell me that my stomach for whatever reason doesn’t close right. So I went back to a doctor and he said it was completely normal. But I burp all the time. Yup, normal. I sometimes throw up for no reason. Yup, normal. So there you have it kids, I am 24 years old and burp all the time. Normal.

Hoppie and Delta have a running joke that when I start burping you have 10 minutes to put food in my stomach before my stomach explodes and I ruin the day with my whining. So I can’t eat certain things, I am the master of puking and rallying when we are out drinking, and I burp ALL THE TIME. It is very charming.

This is half the reason I kept running after I ran my marathon. Running keeps my stomach issues to a minimum. It helps me process food and keep it from screwing with my sliding hiatal hernia. You know, that thing that they won’t fix and everyone has. Right.

So there you have it, internets. That is the problem that plagues my life. I have a stomach that looks like this.

I also really don’t like getting wet and I really hate bright lights.