“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.

But before we explore that further, let’s first get to the bottom of the flatulence. I was desperate. So much so that to get a better handle on my situation, I invested personally in my own hydrogen breath meter.  The way this works is that hydrogen is a major component of the fermented gases in the colon, some of which diffuse into the breath where it can be measured. I was expecting gargantuan values. But the highest I got was six parts per million, which basically means no hydrogen. That made no sense whatsoever and was completely the opposite of that initial result from November 1996. So I ended up returning the device, puzzled as ever.

I tried courses of herbal antibiotics and probiotics. In fact, I was probably the first person in the United States to order and try Lactobacillus GG from a dairy farm in Finland. (Today, it’s marketed as Culturelle and is readily available from any pharmacy.)

At this point, my GI in Philadelphia, a well-known one across the world, fired me, insisting that since the antibiotics were not helping, my problem had to be psychiatric. So while I was doctor shopping (and I really shopped hard), I decided to return to real antibiotics by writing my own fake prescription for amoxicillin. The fake prescription worked, but the amoxicillin did not. You can now see how far I was willing to go for a solution.

At this point, I was just lost. The farting was simply unstoppable and nothing fazed it, and my experiments were giving impossible results. It was time to reach out to that author I mentioned earlier, Michael D. Levitt and see if he was willing to help. He was. The first thing we did was to determine the volume of gas. To do this, I hooked myself up with a rectal tube, which in turn we hooked to a breath hydrogen bag. To no one’s surprise, my gas volumes were off the charts. At the time, Dr. Levitt told me he had encountered only two individuals up to this point in his long career as the world’s expert in intestinal gas who had humongous volumes of gas, that guy from 1976 and me. Apparently, I was now among the most flatulent persons in the world.

Let me put that into a little perspective. Consider a giant sports stadium like the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. It seats 82,500. Now imagine 71,176 of these packed stadiums. That’s the number of people on Earth at this time in 1997. Now consider that of all those people, I (and that other person) stand out as being the most flatulent. It’s truly mind-boggling.