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

This is the point where the real story begins, and if you’re in the medical field things start to get weird (there’s that word again) real fast. The night before I had Chinese takeout. It was OK, certainly not with any off-taste or smell that would make me think it was about to change my life. And to be fair, I can’t be 100% sure it was the culprit. But something was. This next ‪night, Friday night, I suddenly fell unwell; malaise is probably the word that fits. The next morning, I felt this weird pain across the top of my abdomen corresponding to the location of the transverse colon that I’d eventually come to describe as the transverse eel. I came up with this moniker because an eel is roughly the shape of the colon, the pain felt “electrical” if that makes any sense, and it ran across the top of my abdomen corresponding roughly to the transverse colon.

 

Let me break for a moment to talk about the underpinning of these words: weird symptoms. As you can see from my description, this is a weird (at least to me) symptom and simply calling it “abdominal pain” is, in my view, incomplete and inaccurate. It was a very precise type of pain and in a very specific location. I want to make a special point of this because as we will see going forward, most of my symptoms share these two attributes: rich in character and specific in location. There is also another. In many cases, they don’t correspond—as far as I can tell—to any normal human experience. That is, these symptoms are not described in the medical literature, and so they don’t have names. In fact, the lack of having formal names for my symptoms has forced me to become a linguistic poet and come up with my own names; hence, we have the transverse eel. It’s one among many as we shall see.

 

In addition, I had a fever. I didn’t know how much at that moment because I didn’t own a thermometer. As you can see, I was generally in such good health that I never had the need. The fever began rising and with my new thermometer in hand, on Sunday evening, I measured 104.4 Fahrenheit (40.2 Celsius) so high I thought I might pass out. But I didn’t, and by Monday morning, the fever broke. I had been to the doctor, and as I recall it some stool tests were run, but nothing came of it. By Wednesday, I felt better like the condition had passed.

 

But ‪next Wednesday morning, I felt severely nauseous, and later that day, my abdominal muscles seized up like a board as if I had appendicitis (a sign known as abdominal rigidity). A trip to the ER and an abdominal CT revealed nothing out of the ordinary. My abdomen relaxed after diazepam. But I came home feeling unwell, and for a change I felt some non-specific GI symptoms probably best called dyspepsia.

 

Then another weird symptom. It felt as if there were a little man sitting on the right side of my diaphragm with a little fishing rod and that he caught the top of the liver and was pulling it up. I came to call this symptom the liver fisherman. This symptom appeared on and off for a number of months as I recall.

 

At this point, it wasn’t clear what was going on, but my mind raced, and I was convinced it had to be Crohn’s. An upper GI with small bowel follow through was done to check for that but nothing turned up. Eventually after four months all these symptoms spontaneously faded, and it appeared that the “weird GI infection of 1995” had ended.

 

So all was back to normal (with that functional diarrhea still bugging me from time to time) or was it?