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

Yet another entirely different symptom appeared, a simple sore throat. Ordinarily, when I get a cold, it starts with a sore throat that lasts for a day or two, tops and then quickly moves into the nasal cavity. My PCP at the time diagnosed it a secondary bacterial infection.

But this sore throat just lingered, and I started to become alarmed. The first ENT I saw didn’t make any diagnosis, but the second one quickly diagnosed it as laryngopharyngeal reflux. I was immediately put on a PPI and a few other meds, probably because the ENT was a drug pusher.

Over the next few months, the sore throat healed, but I was on and off the PPI going forward.

On the cerebellitis front, the early morning insomnia started to get out of hand. At one point, I found myself getting up at 7:30 on a Saturday as if I slept 10 hours before. Normally before this, I wouldn’t be able to get up at 7:30 on a weekday let alone a Saturday.

While I was dealing with this and new reflux symptoms, I couldn’t get out my head that dysesthesias of 96 and of 06 were connected to my other symptoms, so I visited a Lyme specialist in January 2010 who put me on a three week course of amoxicillin. It wasn’t until a week or so after I finished it that I felt some real abdominal pain in the lower right quadrant where the illeocecal valve is and that quickly morphed into the return of the spray painting and cheese grater after a 3 year hiatus. Now I was dealing with both the upper and lower GI symptoms simultaneously.

However, this situation did not last long as the lower gut symptoms subsided back into remission after about six weeks. 

They resurfaced a few more times in 2010.

At this point, I was still mulling over what to do next, although it became increasingly clear that I would need a permanent, physical intervention to relieve the upper gut symptoms.