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consumed

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Consumed

July 16, 2015

By Liane Kupferberg Carter

I am at a fish restaurant in the theater district the first time it happens. My sister in law Susan and I have tickets for the matinee performance of “Love, Loss and What I Wore.”  I have just ordered the filet of sole, when suddenly the room gets too bright, the clatter of glassware too loud. A swell of nausea washes over me. My heart pounds; my throat constricts. I can’t breathe. Is it the smell of seafood? A panic attack?

I flee to the ladies’ room. Eventually the sick feelings subside.

But several days later it happens again. Nausea.  Racing heart. Tightness. I go see the cardiologist.

“Everything checks out okay,” she says. “I don’t think it’s your heart. You should see the gastroenterologist.”

I dread the idea of someone threading a camera down my throat. But the nausea quickly becomes unrelenting. I feel systemically sick. After I wake nauseated one night, teeth chattering, I schedule the endoscopy. When I wake up from the anesthesia, the doctor tells me, “The good news is that you don’t have an ulcer. You have some reflux. We’ll have the biopsy back in a week. We’ll start you on a proton pump inhibitor, but if you don’t feel better, come back and we’ll explore further.”

The futuristic-sounding proton pump inhibitor, it turns out, is a fancy name for a Nexium- type medication.  I am hopeful. And for a few weeks I do feel better.  Then the nausea and constriction come back.  The doctor calls it non-specific gastritis. Is he suggesting this is all in my head?  Anxiety gnaws at me. I start to dread eating. I find myself cancelling social appointments, because they all revolve around meals. I am consumed with feeling ill. I think about the many meanings of that word consumed.  Swallowed.  Spent. Drained.  Depleted.   Devoured.  Destroyed.  I wake in the night with a suffocating sense of my own mortality, thinking, I can’t be sick.  Mothers of special needs children have to live forever.

I return to the doctor. He palpates my stomach and weighs me.  I have lost 12 pounds. “I think the medication isn’t helping as much because you have a hybrid form of gastric reflux and irritable bowel,” he says. “Are you under stress?”

I tell him that my younger son, Mickey, has autism and epilepsy.  He nods sympathetically. “Okay, let’s just get an abdominal ultrasound to rule some things out.” Continue Reading…