WARNING: Pretty graphic descriptions of vomiting.
My first experience with reality in the real world was on Super Bowl Sunday February 2, 2014. We were invited to the home of my daughter’s boyfriend. I’d become friends with his mother and stepdad and they had just bought a house about a block away from ours and were hosting a big Super Bowl party. I was so excited about the Seahawks being in the Super Bowl. I’d lost over thirty pounds, and although I had a long way to go because I was still hovering around 250, I was feeling better already. I was sleeping better and feeling more energetic.
Alex and I were running late and we actually arrived just after the kickoff, but if you remember that game at all, when we got there the Seahawks were already up by two because of a safety. I walked in and the center island and most available surfaces in the kitchen were covered with food. It all looked amazing. I had a couple chips, but I was mainly concerned with not eating too many carbs and getting in my protein. As I said a while ago, one of the main things you have to worry about is chewing your food a lot. I got in the habit of calling it the “train” method of eating…chew, chew, chew. But I also was a product of fifty years of habit. Our family almost never chewed their food…just enough to get it down the gullet before shoving the next bite in our mouths. I was also a victim of the years of thought processes that brought me to this point. Dieting had become such a part of my life that every time I saw delicious food, my gut reaction was to eat it as quickly as possible before it got taken away from me.
So, I popped a couple of shrimp hors d’oeuvre’s in my mouth. I was feeling pretty good about eating that because it was protein. I’m not sure if I ate it too quickly without chewing enough or if I ate too much, but it was probably a bit of both. Within five minutes I was feeling pretty bad. I had a knot about midway down my chest. It is a very scary feeling. The new stomach pouch is right behind where the heart is and so there is this worry that what you are actually feeling is more to do with the heart than the stomach. Also, it doesn’t feel like a normal queasy feeling you get when you feel sick to your stomach. There is no stomach acid in the stomach. But the body still wants to get rid of the offending food that is creating the problem. So, suddenly the sinuses open up and the nose starts to run like crazy and post nasal drip is constantly going down the throat. But you don’t want to swallow because a part of your brain is telling you that you don’t want to add anything to your already overfilled stomach. It amazes me how the body responds by creating fluid any way it can to get the offending food out. How does it know that you don’t have stomach acid available to do the job any more?
But the other thing is, that since you don’t have stomach acid it takes a lot longer for the body to finally work up to getting the food out of you. I spent about 45 minutes in the bathroom at the Super Bowl party…the first time I went in there. You begin to feel like you are not going to be able to breath. And you are breathing just fine while this is going on, but still there is a sense of panic because of that tightness in the chest. There is a clutching feeling in the esophagus and you want to be able to reach in and pull out whatever is causing the problem. But because there is so much less fluid it takes much longer for the food to get expelled from your system. I have always hated throwing up more than almost anything else. I can count on my two hands how many times I have thrown up in my lifetime prior to my surgery. One of the main reasons I never drank to excess when all of my friends were doing just that is the fear of throwing up. Whenever I began to feel queasy for any reason I would go inside my head and talk myself out of throwing up. But this was a whole new world. I still didn’t want to throw up, but the sense of panic brought on by this pressure in my chest made me think about calling 911. I was sure I was going to stop breathing, or choke to death. And because there is less fluid, the body has to retch that much harder to get things out. It is quite terrifying.
I was pacing around the bathroom trying to quell my panic and actually looking forward to throwing up because the alternative was scarier, while listening to everyone laughing and cheering the football game. Every once in a while I would hear someone try to open the door to use the bathroom, and so embarrassment that I was hogging the bathroom would war with the feeling of panic. Then when I finally started throwing up it felt like it was never going to end. I actually wondered if I was going to pull a muscle from the violence of the contractions. But the weirdest thing is that when I finally did get some food up, it looks pretty much like it did when I first ate it, only covered in big globs of goo that you would expect to see in the movie Alien. It’s pretty bizarre.
So, that’s how I spent my Super Bowl Sunday. I eventually was able to leave the bathroom, only to have to go in there a while later to throw up again. I got to the point where I figured if I never ate again that would be fine. But this was just the beginning of my journey of vomiting. It was like that experience primed my body to reject things a lot more easily than it had before. And the worst part was that eating is so much of an unconscious thing that it was seconds after I’d swallowed, when it was too late to change it, that I would realize I hadn’t chewed enough. And then it was just a matter of waiting to see if the body would accept it and forgive me, or if it would send me on another hour or two odyssey of terror in an effort to help me learn. I actually got to the point, after a while, of putting my finger down my throat to hurry things along when I realized that I had screwed up too badly. Something I never would have considered before the surgery. But the 45 minutes to an hour or longer of panic and discomfort was much worse than the gagging brought on by making myself throw up. I was having to relearn a lifetime’s worth of bad eating habits, and I guess that takes a bit of terror to change.
But it’s amazing how tenacious those eating habits become…how much they have become embedded in my psyche. They won’t go quietly.