I fasted. I don’t do well when I can’t eat in the morning. My stomach hurts. I get cranky, low blood sugar, etc. But I did it.
I got to the appointment, filled out a ton of paperwork and got called back by Dr. Mathias himself. Wow! Who, what doctor, does that? He asked me quite a few of the same questions that the paperwork did. He got a good picture of my family’s health. Then he listened to my gut. There were a lot of sounds that he said were not normal. The coolest part was that he took off his stethoscope and handed it to me so that I could listen. My gut (stomach, small intestine and large intestine) sounded like Rice Krispies … all snap, crackle and pop.
So, it turns out this doctor is a Neuro-GI doctor. I had no idea that this type of doctor existed. And he was about to perform an EGG, an electrogastrogram. It is sort of like the EKG that measures the electrical impulses of the heart, but this test measures the electrical impulses of the gut. Interesting. I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I thought all GI doctors did endoscopies and colonoscopies. Well, at least with this one I get to keep my clothes on and I don’t have a scope visiting places that no man has ever gone. And there are no awful prep liquids to drink.
Next, I followed the nurse into a small room with a recliner, storage shelves and a computer with a large monitor. The room was cramped, especially once the recliner was fully reclined so that my entire abdomen could be exposed. She placed electrodes on my abdomen in 3 places (stomach, small intestine and large intestine). Then she hooked the electrode wires into a box connected with the computer, turned on the entire set up, turned off the lights and said she would be back in 20 minutes or so. For a bit I watched the lines on the screen move up and down like a very tight sine wave, or a toddler’s scribble.
Once back in the exam room with Dr. Mathias gave me the news.
He said, “No wonder you have problems, your entire GI tract is in seizure, constantly.”
Talk about knock me over. I was stunned. Seizures? In my gut? Is that possible?
Is there a word that describes the thing that happens before disbelief? A word that describes hearing something that you didn’t know could exist so it can’t enter into your brain because there just isn’t a place for it so it hovers around your brain buzzing like a mosquito on a hot humid summer evening in Houston after a heavy rain. Yeah, like that … run on sentence and all. Because you are frozen in place trying to zero in on that darn mosquito so you can swat it and stop the infernal buzzing.
Thankfully Dr. Mathias started talking again and started to explain how it all works so that my left brain took over and I forgot about the mosquito. He even drew pictures.
And then all over again. It was starting to sink in.
My gut never stopped seizing.
My. Entire. Gut. Seized. All. Of. The. Time.
I had abdominal epilepsy.
Speechless.
Full pause.
Say that again.
My gut seizes?
Then the wave of realization crashed down on me.
I have a problem. My gut doesn’t stop seizing.
No wonder I am always hungry.
No wonder I cannot gain weight.
No wonder I cannot fast.
I constantly burn calories.
Whoa! This is huge. I have tears in my eyes. He just found my problem.
During the following consultation, Dr. Mathias told me my body was in fight-or-flight mode 24 hours a day, seven days a week. My body would never heal because my parasympathetic nervous system was shut out. I would continue to get sicker and sicker.
Dr. Mathias prescribed some epilepsy medication, the smallest dosage possible. He also suggested fulvic minerals, Barlean’s Total Omegas, and some B vitamins.
I walked out of his office feeling a barrage of feelings that culminated in a numbness. I walked woodenly to the car. And the first thing I did was call my mother.
A miracle … He found my problem.
And I cried and smiled at the same time.