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

Finally, to put the malabsorption theory to bed, I had a small bowel biopsy, which as you might guess by now, was normal.

Around this time, the doctor I was seeing was on the one hand was insisting there was nothing wrong with my small bowel, but he wanted to me to take pancreatic enzymes presumably because he somehow felt I wasn’t digesting carbohydrates. Of course, neither one was correct and he knew it. He just couldn’t accept the reality.

Now, I, too, was stymied. At this point, medical science has absolutely proven that I had no malabsorption, yet the flatulence (as well as the odd and severe gut discomforts) continued unabated.

This was also a changing point for me. My other GI (was I lucky to have two at this time?) had been calling my condition IBS but despite the worsening and, how should I put it, the strangeness of my symptoms, he was simply insisting it was “getting worse”.

However, I had engaged myself on an online chat group dedicated to IBS, and it was quite obvious that the symptoms people were describing bore little resemblance to what I was suffering from. IBS patients never complained of excessive flatulence. They did complain of “gas pains,” which is ironic given that I experienced nine months of gargantuan flatulence without feeling a thing. It seemed the pain of these patients was being misattributed to gas, probably because they had never experienced actual excessive gas and weren’t aware of how it actually manifests. The same can be said of GI doctors, too.

Second, patients didn’t mince words about their pain, but while I was calling my two weird sensations “pain”, I already knew something more was going on there because, after all, these sensations felt weird.

Third, IBS patients were often trying various dietary manipulations, but none of them seemed to be suffering to the point where they had to outright drop meals.

Fourth, IBS patients were often focused on their diarrhea and constipation, and while I had an uptick in diarrhea, this symptom wasn’t a major player; the sensations and the flatus were.

One thing I had come across in the medical library were these flowcharts that would lead one to a diagnosis. But it all started to feel rigged because they were multiple choice. That is, your final diagnosis is already at the bottom. It’s known. But what if my condition wasn’t on the list to begin with?