“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.
The Disease Morphs
But then another earth-shaking event. On the night of January 15, 2007, I had my one meal a day dinner as usual, and it didn’t take long for me to feel something was off. I started feeling the bloating I felt a few times in the years earlier. It repeated again the next evening and the next, and it was clear something had morphed. Indeed, when the time came for my spray painting and cheesegrater to start like clockwork, they didn’t. I felt bloated instead. Over the next weeks, I had to reduce my dinner to Ensure, a nutritional drink, and even then I was starting to get bloated almost immediately after eating. Hours later, on lying down, it felt intensely uncomfortable, and I had to sit up, only to dry heave. I started having many nights of this and at one point, I went to the ER where they took an X-ray, an X-ray after I had dry heaved nine times. Here’s the x-ray.
As you can see, my stomach is massively engorged with air. So two things are happening here. First, the spray painting and cheesegrater have outright vanished entirely. They’re just gone and replacing them is this massive bloating and a variety of sensations to go with it. Ironically, aerophagia is claimed to cause bloating, but as we have seen in my case, aerophagia causes only flatus and no other symptom. The bloating has some other cause. It seemed that whatever was causing the spray painting and cheesegrater has given up on those symptoms and is now causing this bloating.
Anyway, I started immediately getting nervous that I would very quickly lose the ability to eat entirely but over the ensuing weeks, the symptoms started morphing again, and I wasn’t quite sure in what ways yet, but it started letting up immediately as I was eating dinner, so I was able to gradually resume my normally large dinners.
After dinner, things start to be calm, and only hours later, did the bloating and dry heaving start. There was no question that lying down adversely impacted this, generally being the thing that triggered the dry heaves, so I had to spend many nights sitting on the couch until the symptoms resolved. And resolve they did. Each night, the symptoms would start up, remain engaged for several hours, and then I could literally feel my gut “starting up” again. Generally, this was around 5 AM or so. At that point, I could go to bed.
Over time, I began to notice that some days were better than other days and sometimes there were a lot of bad days, a few good days, but then eventually, it was different, like the opposite. Unfortunately, I didn’t systematically write up how each day faired, but I did begin to discern a very weird (there’s that word again) pattern. It seemed there were two patterns one inside the other. There was an eight day cycle where I had six days of uninterrupted severe symptoms followed by two days of milder symptoms, and this subcycle would continue for about 14 to 16 weeks. At that point, the severe and milder phases would reverse such that I would then experience six days of mild symptoms followed by two days of severe symptoms. Unfortunately, this is based on my intuitive sense of what transcribed and not on any formal journal entries.
At this point, I began referring to the bloating and its sensations as the upper gut symptoms, and the spray painting and cheesegrater as the lower gut symptoms.