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

This was now my new normal going forward. Later in 1999, I moved to New York and things were status quo. I had to find a doctor there and that was proving difficult because as was the case before because no doctor wanted to deal with a patient with a disease the likes of which they have never seen. Eventually a found a doctor who appeared to take my case seriously after reading Dr. Levitt’s paper.

One interestingly new symptom appeared in 2002. About three hours after eating dinner, my nose started to run. The severity seemed to be tied to what I ate. A pepperoni pizza surely made it severe, for example. Second-generation antihistamines didn’t seem to impact it. However, Chlor-Trimetron did a bit, so I took that prophylactically periodically and didn’t really even bring it up.

In the Fall of 2003, I had developed some constipation and difficulty evacuating resulting in my needing to strain.

By the beginning of the following year, I noticed a bulge where there shouldn’t be one, and it was clear I had developed a right inguinal hernia. At this point, I had to decide what type of surgery to repair it. I borrowed this rather amusing textbook where each chapter was written by a different surgeon touting his own approach and belitting his fellow authors in the process. At one point, I visited a laparoscopic surgeon where while in the waiting room, a prior patient came in, letting the receptionist know that his hernia had returned. This was in line what the authors of traditional approaches railed against. In 2004, laparoscopic techniques to repair hernias weren’t ready for prime time. That coupled with the laparoscopic surgeon’s seemingly odd claim my situation was emergent (it wasn’t), and his description of the surgery as being more stressful to the body than many traditional approaches had convinced me to go with the traditional approach.

But there was something else. During this time I was deciding and starting to have misgivings about the laparascopic approach seem to trigger an odd symptom. Just as I was readying for bed instead of my gut coming alive with spray painting and the cheesegrater, it started to feel as if I were bloating. This continued for a whole week until I firmly decided to go with the traditional approach, and the symptom went away, but that was surely an odd experience.

The surgery was done April 20, 2004 and went well. It took me about ten days to fully recuperate and that was that with that.

I think at some point later in the year, I had another run in with that odd bloating symptom, and it promptly disappeared. In 2005, I had yet another run-in with it and here again it lasted for a week. This was a foreshadowing of what was to come.