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

Anyway, I was still very much on the hunt for something, anything that could give me some control over my GI symptoms, and I had an idea. Glucagon. From what I read, glucagon should, in theory, paralyze the intestine, and I was curious to see what effect it would have on my spray painting and cheesegrater. So in 2006, I convinced my doctor to teach me how to inject glucagon. And I tried it. Lo and behold, it did indeed paralyze the small and large intestine and brought my symptoms to heel entirely. I was blown away. Aside from adjusting my meal times, I had no way to impact my symptoms at all. And here for the first time, I found something that gave me a sense of control.

Unfortunately, there were problems. The one mg dose was pretty hefty, and it caused a precipitous drop in blood sugar. Wait, what, what did I just say? Shouldn’t glucagon raise the blood sugar? Of course, it does, perhaps more than double, but it’s not going to stay that way because this is happening in a biological system that is designed to maintain homeostasis. So when it sees the blood sugar jetting into the stratosphere, it starts massively pumping out insulin, which because the glucagon has stopped flowing in, results in a major overshoot, causing the blood sugar to fall almost to the point of insulin shock. The solution was to cut back the dose of the injection, enough to affect the symptoms, but not so much to bring down the blood sugar. By the way, one of the side effects of glucagon is nausea, and I think it’s the quick lowering of blood sugar that results in nausea, not because of its effects on the gut nervous system.

The second problem was the effect is short-lived, not more than an hour. And, of course, it has to be injected.

In the end, it wasn’t a practical therapy, and I had to abandon it.