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

We begin my story during my childhood in Brooklyn, when I was about 11 or 12. Now I don’t remember the symptoms that led me to see a GI doctor.  Whatever they were, they were severe enough for my parents to bring me to see a GI, but not severe enough for me to remember. The doctor I saw was Abraham Jelin, who may still be practicing as of this writing (2024) and may even reading this (hi!). Dr. Jelin apparently didn’t seem too concerned either. He had me do a hand X-ray (presumably because I short enough he wanted to be sure I wasn’t stunted; I now stand 5’4″). He also put me on Metamucil (psyllium) and juice, which I dutifully drank for a summer. And that was that with that.

Whatever those symptoms were faded away, and I didn’t think about my GI tract again until 1989 when I had this weird (you will see this word so frequently I ask you to promise that you won’t complain when you can’t get it out of your head) abdominal pain that hurt only when I started to move. Stationary, I was fine. So I sat motionless for something like two hours, and it was gone. And that was that with that.

Once again, I didn’t think about my gut for a long time—until shortly after I moved to Philadelphia in 1992 when I discovered my next door neighbor had a guitar he like to play. So I can’t say that that stress—and it was quite stressful—didn’t trigger something, but it was on the day of the Superbowl in 1993 that I had out of the blue my first diarrhea attack. They came on every so often without any other symptoms other than urgency.  At one point, I visited a primary care doctor, and after I was summarily told it was the result of childhood trauma (medical schools: what on Earth are you teaching?), I decided to treat it on my own with prophylactic loperamide until I eventually visited a GI who did my first colonoscopy and upper GI with small follow through. Nothing was found, and I officially had a diagnosis of IBS even though it didn’t meet formal Rome criteria (a set of criteria for diagnosing what are now called disorders of brain-gut interaction) because I had no pain. It seems that the Rome IV disorder (Rome criteria has been revised repeatedly over the years; IV is the current incarnation as of this writing) functional diarrhea would have been more apt. Anyway, this remained the status quo until a rather earth shaking event happened on February 23rd, 1995.