The Anatomy of Animosity. It is hard to believe that last year I had a spat with one of my favorite beings in this world. One never really clearly knows the chronology of a fight. People think they know where it all began but really they are just guessing, trying to make tidy and linear sense of situations that never are. "I am mad at him because he is obsessive with the remote control." No you are not. You are mad at him because three months ago he didn't answer quickly enough when you asked his opinion about your fancy outfit, and to add egregiousness, it was the night of your high school reunion and you were frothing with angst. Dig deeper....
My fights, my animosities are usually rooted in much earlier events than those that I could perceive and recollect once the blow out happens. In the case of my sister, I realize now that it was not just the wording of her texts that frustrated me, although....they were great contenders at the time. I think back to March or April of last year, when I told her about my diagnosis, and about how I was suffering: "I have been really sick. It is my esophagus. I am having trouble keeping food down, and I get sick a lot." "Get sick" became my self-prescribed code for what I considered the societally-accepted way of explaining that I was vomiting my meals. Sometimes 30% of them. Sometimes 70%. The tricky thing was that, as with any ambiguous phrase like saying "we got together" when you really mean "we had sex for the first time," you have to have an initial establishment of that terminology with your listener (work with me!). Some people, like my analytical and exact brother Luis Héctor, would not let it go and ask for clarification: "You mean, throwing up?" The inevitable awkward yuck moment. Answer. But then it was out of the way, and in future conversations it would just be the toned down "getting sick" - as in "I have been getting sick all the time." Which became, sadly, true. During those months I lost weight with a frightening consistency - almost a linear graph of 5-8 pounds a month.
Here circling back to the fuel for animosity, I could not get my sister to talk about anything else other than my weight. "I am so jealous! You are such an inspiration." "¿Como hiciste?" How did you manage it? "I need to lose 20lbs." It really got my goat. And let me just say, I don't usually use that expression because, let’s face it, it is farm-fresh-gumby. If it had been from my great powerwalks in the Berkeley Hills, nestled in the canopy of Tilden Park’s Eucalyptus and Redwood forests, while happily burning off toxins and calories, I would have wanted to talk about the weigh loss endlessly….probably.
But really. What the heck?!? I felt like saying to her, "You realize I have been vomiting all the time, right?" If a person said that they had the flu or were undergoing chemotherapy, there would be an immediate, widely reverential end to the questioning. If it were something more understood, rather that this random thing that affects – as some sources note – 1 in 100,000 people and has no known cause, I wonder if I would have gotten some quiet understanding. Just a solemn nod to what a nightmare my life had turned into. So there it was: old, murky, brewed-like-a-nasty-batch-of-Kombucha animosity. Things that I never asserted myself to object to in their proper moment surfacing in the gasping 'I am over it' exasperation. But…perhaps the real fuel to my frustration was the struggle, the months and months of struggle with the illness.
As I have quoted Stephen Colbert before: Tragedy + Time = Comedy. And since I have had the luxury of time, and distance, and miraculous acupuncture treatments to be healthier and beat this illness, yes, tragedy plus all that may just equal a good, hard laugh.
Of Achalasia, and how much do you really want to know about vomiting?
For a year, I was turned into a human volleyball to the medical system, going from my local gastroenterologist’s office to then being referred to Stanford Medical Center (cue the scary violin music), and made to go through multiple manometries and CAT scans, Barium swallows and endoscopies. I had to have so many rounds of bloodwork at Quest Diagnostics that I used to joke with Jimmy that I might as well just pitch a tent outside their laboratory.
I used to kid that I was gathering illnesses with creepy Greek names. The Achalasia with which I was diagnosed gave me as a byproduct rampant Anemia. Not the eat a little more spinach type of anemia, but the type that would have me grasping on to the hallway walls in near blackouts, if I came down the stairs at my normal pace or if I got up from the dining room chair too fast.
And at the lowest, it happened. Here comes my writer’s honesty vomit – eerily apropos. It was my 50th birthday, all dressed up in an outfit that made me feel great: a dress with black lace over a peek-a-boo rose colored material - super comfortable but super nice; my black Anne Klein boots - the new, cool riding boots. A dark denim little jacket to say, "Yes, I am dressed up, but I am also appropriately dressed down for a day tromping around the City and the museum." "Really, I belong in NYC. I am not trying too hard." It was Pretty Girl Monday, the titled day tradition (see Week 7) I had started in the spring, like the later named Wonder Woman Wednesday. This particular Monday in New York was a trifecta then: new dress, my birthday, Monday!
It was a simple glass of juice. Mid-morning, a break after enjoying the Kandinski early years exhibit docent tour. Watermelon. Not acidic, seemingly innocuous. In other circles more Latinocentric, it would have been called an agua fresca. Let me reiterate: simple. But after days and days of traveling in the East Coast and restaurant foods and trying to keep up with normal people with normal esophagi (see how I respected the plural there!), my digestion was compromised and mercurial. I drank a few ounces of the juice and then the telltale discomfort, then real pain, like a fist clenching closed at the opening of my stomach, which in my new Achalasia-inherited vocabulary, I know now is the LES – the Lower Esophageal Sphincter, that damned but preciously valuable muscle that relaxes when you eat to let food "go down" as they say. It is the gatekeeper of your stomach, in perfect synchronicity with your esophagus, which in its glorious, normal function has Peristalsis, the immediate undulating action that moves food down the esophageal tube and to the LES, before this one relaxes to let the food in to your stomach. If you have peristaltic waves and a functioning LES, you don't know it. I am jealous.
It is like not knowing what a carburetor does until your mechanic says you have to drop a couple of hundred dollars to get your car back in running order. (Oh, that’s right; modern cars have fuel injection, but I do love the word carburetor.) And, in the days when I would be consumed with this inner structure that we take for granted, I would sometimes conjure up the visual of the long, long snake in The Little Prince that has the giant elephant in its belly.
So, welcome to my world. Now you know way too much about your digestive system.
But back to the watermelon juice. 5 minutes into drinking it, I knew there was no choice. Only one thing would make the pain go away. With eyes starting to tear from the spasm, I excused myself from the table where I sat overlooking sunny Central Park with my daughter and husband, and went in search of the nearest bathroom. Luckily, only around the corner through the adjacent gallery, there it was and... unoccupied! So this is how I came to accidentally desecrate one of my favorite places on Earth, The Guggenheim Museum in beautiful New York City. In a tiny, pie-shaped single bathroom, I – as demurely and neatly as possible – voided my esophagus of the offending four ounces of juice into the toilet bowl. This was my architectural rock bottom. It would be akin to maybe chipping a stone in Machu Picchu with your big ass, klutzy hiking boot's heel. Mortified. Will I ever get over it? Yes. And writing about it now helps. Thank you for listening. Now you are my confidant to "The Day I Threw Up In The Guggenheim."
Sorry Frank Lloyd Wright. He would understand. People understand the inevitable need to throw up. And I know he would have held my hair.
With much gratitude, to Berkeley Community Acupuncture and Thuy Nguyen
www.BCAclinic.com
So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright – written and performed by Simon & Garfunkel
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf0RrF6KsI8
And one of my jams! A song about bellies….
Belly Of The Whale – by Burning Sensations
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocRVFI4EggM
My fights, my animosities are usually rooted in much earlier events than those that I could perceive and recollect once the blow out happens. In the case of my sister, I realize now that it was not just the wording of her texts that frustrated me, although....they were great contenders at the time. I think back to March or April of last year, when I told her about my diagnosis, and about how I was suffering: "I have been really sick. It is my esophagus. I am having trouble keeping food down, and I get sick a lot." "Get sick" became my self-prescribed code for what I considered the societally-accepted way of explaining that I was vomiting my meals. Sometimes 30% of them. Sometimes 70%. The tricky thing was that, as with any ambiguous phrase like saying "we got together" when you really mean "we had sex for the first time," you have to have an initial establishment of that terminology with your listener (work with me!). Some people, like my analytical and exact brother Luis Héctor, would not let it go and ask for clarification: "You mean, throwing up?" The inevitable awkward yuck moment. Answer. But then it was out of the way, and in future conversations it would just be the toned down "getting sick" - as in "I have been getting sick all the time." Which became, sadly, true. During those months I lost weight with a frightening consistency - almost a linear graph of 5-8 pounds a month.
Here circling back to the fuel for animosity, I could not get my sister to talk about anything else other than my weight. "I am so jealous! You are such an inspiration." "¿Como hiciste?" How did you manage it? "I need to lose 20lbs." It really got my goat. And let me just say, I don't usually use that expression because, let’s face it, it is farm-fresh-gumby. If it had been from my great powerwalks in the Berkeley Hills, nestled in the canopy of Tilden Park’s Eucalyptus and Redwood forests, while happily burning off toxins and calories, I would have wanted to talk about the weigh loss endlessly….probably.
But really. What the heck?!? I felt like saying to her, "You realize I have been vomiting all the time, right?" If a person said that they had the flu or were undergoing chemotherapy, there would be an immediate, widely reverential end to the questioning. If it were something more understood, rather that this random thing that affects – as some sources note – 1 in 100,000 people and has no known cause, I wonder if I would have gotten some quiet understanding. Just a solemn nod to what a nightmare my life had turned into. So there it was: old, murky, brewed-like-a-nasty-batch-of-Kombucha animosity. Things that I never asserted myself to object to in their proper moment surfacing in the gasping 'I am over it' exasperation. But…perhaps the real fuel to my frustration was the struggle, the months and months of struggle with the illness.
As I have quoted Stephen Colbert before: Tragedy + Time = Comedy. And since I have had the luxury of time, and distance, and miraculous acupuncture treatments to be healthier and beat this illness, yes, tragedy plus all that may just equal a good, hard laugh.
Of Achalasia, and how much do you really want to know about vomiting?
For a year, I was turned into a human volleyball to the medical system, going from my local gastroenterologist’s office to then being referred to Stanford Medical Center (cue the scary violin music), and made to go through multiple manometries and CAT scans, Barium swallows and endoscopies. I had to have so many rounds of bloodwork at Quest Diagnostics that I used to joke with Jimmy that I might as well just pitch a tent outside their laboratory.
I used to kid that I was gathering illnesses with creepy Greek names. The Achalasia with which I was diagnosed gave me as a byproduct rampant Anemia. Not the eat a little more spinach type of anemia, but the type that would have me grasping on to the hallway walls in near blackouts, if I came down the stairs at my normal pace or if I got up from the dining room chair too fast.
And at the lowest, it happened. Here comes my writer’s honesty vomit – eerily apropos. It was my 50th birthday, all dressed up in an outfit that made me feel great: a dress with black lace over a peek-a-boo rose colored material - super comfortable but super nice; my black Anne Klein boots - the new, cool riding boots. A dark denim little jacket to say, "Yes, I am dressed up, but I am also appropriately dressed down for a day tromping around the City and the museum." "Really, I belong in NYC. I am not trying too hard." It was Pretty Girl Monday, the titled day tradition (see Week 7) I had started in the spring, like the later named Wonder Woman Wednesday. This particular Monday in New York was a trifecta then: new dress, my birthday, Monday!
It was a simple glass of juice. Mid-morning, a break after enjoying the Kandinski early years exhibit docent tour. Watermelon. Not acidic, seemingly innocuous. In other circles more Latinocentric, it would have been called an agua fresca. Let me reiterate: simple. But after days and days of traveling in the East Coast and restaurant foods and trying to keep up with normal people with normal esophagi (see how I respected the plural there!), my digestion was compromised and mercurial. I drank a few ounces of the juice and then the telltale discomfort, then real pain, like a fist clenching closed at the opening of my stomach, which in my new Achalasia-inherited vocabulary, I know now is the LES – the Lower Esophageal Sphincter, that damned but preciously valuable muscle that relaxes when you eat to let food "go down" as they say. It is the gatekeeper of your stomach, in perfect synchronicity with your esophagus, which in its glorious, normal function has Peristalsis, the immediate undulating action that moves food down the esophageal tube and to the LES, before this one relaxes to let the food in to your stomach. If you have peristaltic waves and a functioning LES, you don't know it. I am jealous.
It is like not knowing what a carburetor does until your mechanic says you have to drop a couple of hundred dollars to get your car back in running order. (Oh, that’s right; modern cars have fuel injection, but I do love the word carburetor.) And, in the days when I would be consumed with this inner structure that we take for granted, I would sometimes conjure up the visual of the long, long snake in The Little Prince that has the giant elephant in its belly.
So, welcome to my world. Now you know way too much about your digestive system.
But back to the watermelon juice. 5 minutes into drinking it, I knew there was no choice. Only one thing would make the pain go away. With eyes starting to tear from the spasm, I excused myself from the table where I sat overlooking sunny Central Park with my daughter and husband, and went in search of the nearest bathroom. Luckily, only around the corner through the adjacent gallery, there it was and... unoccupied! So this is how I came to accidentally desecrate one of my favorite places on Earth, The Guggenheim Museum in beautiful New York City. In a tiny, pie-shaped single bathroom, I – as demurely and neatly as possible – voided my esophagus of the offending four ounces of juice into the toilet bowl. This was my architectural rock bottom. It would be akin to maybe chipping a stone in Machu Picchu with your big ass, klutzy hiking boot's heel. Mortified. Will I ever get over it? Yes. And writing about it now helps. Thank you for listening. Now you are my confidant to "The Day I Threw Up In The Guggenheim."
Sorry Frank Lloyd Wright. He would understand. People understand the inevitable need to throw up. And I know he would have held my hair.
With much gratitude, to Berkeley Community Acupuncture and Thuy Nguyen
www.BCAclinic.com
So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright – written and performed by Simon & Garfunkel
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf0RrF6KsI8
And one of my jams! A song about bellies….
Belly Of The Whale – by Burning Sensations
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocRVFI4EggM