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

By now, I had been to many doctors many of which wanted nothing to do with me given that I had symptoms they never seen before. Dr. Schuster was different. He was concerned as a doctor and interested like a scientist. The only other doctor to have these qualities was Dr. Levitt. What does it say about the practice of medicine that only these two doctors out of a few dozen were truly exceptional?

Anyway, after reviewing my situation, Dr. Schuster laid out a bombshell: that I had a disease new to medical science. Once again, as with the aerophagia diagnosis, I was speechless. Dr. Schuster had just confirmed what I had known all along. Coming from him, it was a  huge vindication, that all my observations and conclusions about my condition had been dead-on accurate. Little did I know what effect this was about to have.

Up to this point, my symptom severity was about 80% severity 80% of the time. The only reason the last number was capped at 80% was that I had four hours of respite every night due to the fact that my disease couldn’t bother me during fed state. It was literally fixed at 80% every day.

Within days, I remember walking to my car to go to work, and I felt “clear”. That is, my gut wasn’t spewing its contents all over the place, as it normally does with spray painting. The cheesegrater was nowhere to be found. I felt like a normal, healthy person. The last time I felt like had occurred on the day before I got officially sick, May 22, 1996. The next few weeks confirmed this drastic change in behavior. The 80% severity level 80% of the time had shrunk in half to about 80 severity 40% of the time. And it did it all after Dr. Schuster had told me I had a new disease. This couldn’t possibly be coincidence. Living with novel symptoms and dealing with all those inept doctors I had been enlisting (and for that matter, periods where I had no doctor all) to help with them had a major impact on my psyche. So much so that it somehow, through some unknown mechanism turned up the volume on these symptoms dramatically. Now with that stress removed, the symptoms behaved just as the did before (the underlying pathology was not affected), except the frequency of their maximal intensity significantly decreased. I was still unable to eat breakfast or lunch. Remember that in the past, after the fed state had converted back to fasting after a meal, the symptoms would crank with a vengeance. They were generally not as intense during a fasting day, but they were still intense enough that bringing back breakfast or lunch was still out of the question.