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

I finally had come across the medical psychologist out of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center I mentioned earlier, who was the practitioner operating with the silly explanation of aerophagia as some sort of ridiculously revved-up swallowing frequency. However, beyond showing that my swallowing frequency was normal while my gas output was grossly abnormal, the nursing staff got upset at me to the point where they refused to have me on a patient going forward. Does this happen elsewhere? Isn’t this crazy? Even this guy I was seeing for the aerophagia expressed astonishment. At this point, I was seeing Dr. Marvin Schuster there, and he reluctantly had to refer me to the Mayo clinic in Rochester.

However, my visit there was handily the worst experience I had as a patient in my entire life. The doctor there was clearly miffed that Schuster sent me to him, and he not only showed little interest in my case history but he also delighted in my suffering like a child with a new toy. No, you didn’t misread that. That is a thing that really happened—at the Mayo Clinic of all places.

And there’s more. If you are in the US, perhaps you are familiar with one Mark Foley. He was a congressman from Florida who helped write anti-sexual abuse legislation and what do you know, he was caught in his own sexual abuse scandal.

To tie this to the doctor at Mayo, there is a medical textbook that features a chapter on the doctor-patient relationship written by, you guessed it, this doctor himself! Somehow, I managed to get him to agree to some testing. The first test was very odd. They had me eat a meal, do a gastric scan with the gamma camera and then eat a second meal and do a second scan. Having a second meal will totally disrupt the fed to fasting pattern, which makes no sense, but that’s what he had me do.

The second test was a colonic manometry to be performed by another doctor at Mayo. I explained to him my pattern of symptoms and suggested how to best test it, but he like the other doctor couldn’t care less about investigating that and decided to do the test in a way to produce the least amount of data possible. You can’t make this stuff up.

I was hooked up to four water perfused manometry tubes connected to what appeared to be an old school EEG machine. During the study, the second doctor popped in to admonish me to not move around as the sensors were “sensitive”. When he left, I poked and prodded by descending colon to see if I could get it to register. Nothing. It was clear that these “sensors” were merely recording contractions (and here who is to say they how good a job they were doing of that), and they couldn’t possibly detect the jet sprays of digesta against the walls of the lumen, the spray painting, that is. Needless to say, he didn’t let the study run long enough to see my coming out of fed state and observe the symptoms kick into overdrive. I asked the nasty nurse about getting a copy of the results, and she angrily shot this prospect down.

There were apparently no nice, competent medical stuff at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. The second doctor reported to me he saw nothing unusual in the study, as if he would have told me if there were. However, the very nice people (yes, they did exist, after all) at the medical records department not only packaged up the entire recording, they sent it US Express Mail on Christmas day, in time for my appointment with Dr. Schuster the following day.

I already received a letter from my Mayo doctor where he had written what appeared to be a chain letter with all sorts of details incorrect as if they forgotten to edit them out. It reported the diagnosis of IBS. I would assume that while Mayo Rochester does it gets a small share of commonly diagnosed stuff, it stands to reason, they do see a fair number of patients with complex problems, so it seemed odd to have a chain letter with an obviously incorrect diagnosis prepared at all. But then again, they put a lot of effort to avoid taking my problem seriously. Come to think of it, they asked me to take a number of psychological tests before the initial meeting, implying that their agenda was to gaslight all the patients with any kind of functional bowel condition in an effort to wash their hands of them.

One thing that might be recorded by the manometry were very high pressures, way beyond normal. That such pressures were present was almost certainly the case. But they do they show up? It’s not entirely clear. The graph had no labeled x axis, either showing a mm of mercury equivalent or inches of water. So I don’t know the scale. However, each graph had a maximum where the pen doesn’t exceed. Was this calibrated at some obscene amount? Probably not because then that would compress normal amplitude data and data didn’t look compressed. However, I got to thinking what exactly is being recorded. There is water perfusing through a tube. Compress the water until it stops flowing entirely, and you’ve reached the maximum amplitude. If the contraction is any stronger than that, it won’t show because it’s not able to register that. So this method of recording contractions might actually be pretty limited. Any insight someone with experience in manometric gut recording can provide would be much appreciated.

But one thing it did show was this: as I’ve already described eating a meal causes the symptoms to dissipate across the entire bowel including the colon, which is contrary to medical science which believes—incorrectly—that the fed state applies to only the small bowel. Here we saw the contractions in the colon go quiet within minutes of eating what they had me eat. And it stayed that way for the remainder of the study. Had they kept the test going, they would have seen it come back with many forceful contractions, but they didn’t.