How A Stomach Ache Saved My Life And Forced Me To Examine The Gut Microbiome
After the surgical removal of my gallbladder, I began to listen to the screams from within
It was french fries that put me over the edge. As I swallowed the last french fry I would ever eat, I felt nothing particularly notable. I snuggled lazily into bed while watching a movie and fell asleep. I woke up approximately 2 hours later with an ache in my upper abdomen.
It was uncomfortable and the pain was in an unfamiliar place. Normally a tummy ache will resolve itself in simple ways. Knowing this, I lay back down hugging an ice pack to the sore spot, and fell back asleep. The next time I woke up it was several hours later and the pain was still nagging at me.
The pain was not high up in my pain threshold. I could have accepted that pain for a while longer because it was not unbearable. The persistence of the ache was a signal of warning to me. I knew that I had developed a problem with the machine which is my body.
My calm demeanor and the fact that the pain still allowed me to move freely without trouble presented a strange interaction with the physicians upon my arrival in their emergency room. When I was asked what number my pain was on a scale from one through ten I gave it a…
