After I first starting getting really sick to stomach, everyone asked me all the time if I was pregnant. I carried around Pepto-Bismol and crackers and sprite.  I regularly turned green and ran off to the bathroom.  I guess it looked like a good time in my life to be pregnant from the outside, but on the inside, I couldn’t imagine layering my mystery disease on top of a pregnancy.  I wouldn’t be able to get out bed. 

I have had almost continual nausea for about four years now.  It started with wooziness followed by serious pain.  My chest, just to the right of the v-shaped spot where my breast bone begins, felt like there was a knife permanently lodged inside.  The pain came and went. Then it got worse, and worse, and worse.  Finally, I ended up in the emergency room at the local teaching hospital.  My best childhood friend, Betsy, drove 45 minutes to get me and then another 45 to take me back to the city, because there was nothing in the town where I lived at the time. 

As I sat on a bed between a schizophrenic and hysteric, I held my knees to my chest and cursed under my breath.  At least they gave me morphine until the doctor showed up and said, “Love, we have us a bad gall bladder” (He was a Kiwi). 

So I went my parents’ house and I let my Dad’s highest recommended surgeon, who has operated on just about everyone in the family and employs my Aunt, do a lacroscopic cholecystectomy. 

Things went better for a few months.  The pain went away, the woozy vanished.  Other than not being able to process alcohol very well, I felt mostly okay for almost a year. I missed drinking wine regularly, and regretted it when I did, but that wasn’t a huge burden. I’ve never been a really heavy drinker.

 Then, the woozy came back with a vengeance. I threw up out of my car window while riding down the road more regularly than I want to admit. I spent days just trying to make myself sleep so I wouldn’t feel like the ground was going to start buckling beneath me.  I tried diet changes, I tried everything I could think of, and nothing helped.  I was a bulimic against my will, in a way.  I didn’t lose much weight, sadly, but I definitely didn’t keep everything I ate down. My regular doctor was convinced it was a matter of taking enough sulfrucate and prevacid.  He was sure I probably had stress-induced ulcers. 

Before the diagnosis, I was throwing up about one meal a day, every day.  The pain came back too. It was not as urgent as the first time my gall gave me trouble, but it was unrelenting.  Then there were the even less pleasant lower-colon symptoms I had at the same time. 

I finally went in for two colonoscopies and a stomach scope. Not a single ulcer. Not a single polyp in my lower intestine.  The only thing the doctor’s could figure was PCS.  Post Cholecystectomy Syndrome.  Basically, the gall bladder removal doesn’t get rid of all of the symptoms. The way my doctor explained it to me was, “You have to take it out if it goes bad.  A bad gall bladder can kill you.  But, some people really need their gall bladder.  Some people really don’t.  If you take it out of a person who needs it, the symptoms will be there for life.” 

Life, the man said.  I’m going to feel like I’m seasick for the rest of my life.   It’s hard to explain exactly how hard it is to walk around like a normal person all day when you are constantly on the brink of losing your lunch.  It is like perpetually being on a ship, in a certain way. I never could go out on the open ocean without a Dramamine, which usually didn’t work anyway.

I once spent an entire whale-watching trip on a schooner below deck throwing up, and I had a Dramamine and one of those little “anti-seasickness” bracelets.  I once traveled seven miles in a tandem sea kayak and didn’t see a thing until we hit the beach we were looking for. I had my cap over my eyes so I couldn’t see the waves.  If I did that, I could just paddle by instinct and let the rudder man guide.   Otherwise, it was going to up-chuck city.  

I obviously had nauseaistic tendencies (yes I made up nauseaistic) before I ever heard that a gall bladder could go bad.   This makes my prospects for living a woozy-free life even slimmer, I suppose.

There’s a cholesterol drug I can take, but I have to take it at exactly the right time of day or I’m completely screwed for the rest of the day and probably the next.  I haven’t quite figured out the mechanism of what exactly is going on, but it has something to do with bile salts not binding properly.  The medication mostly takes care of my symptoms. It doesn’t take care of my overly active case of acid reflux which just complicates the whole matter. For that, I need prevacid.

I can’t get prevacid. The medication is like gold.  No insurance company wants to cover it because a month’s worth is around $300.00.  It’s a miracle drug as far as I am concerned. If I take just the right combo of the cholesterol medication and prevacid, I feel completely normal.  If I don’t, I’m in trouble.  For a long time, I relied on my Dad’s easy access to samples.  Lately, though, prevacid samples have become scarce. I can get some protonix, but that is a poor, poor substitute.  

All of this generally works, except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, I want to find some underground barter in acid reflux medication among the children of medical professionals. I wonder if the drug dealer who lives at the end of my street can get me about three month’s worth.   When I can’t get my hands on prevacid for awhile, I have nights like tonight. 

I pulled into the parking lot of the Unitarian church, completed surrounded by a fog so thick the windows looked more like fuzzy, bright Christmas lights and puked until I could drive the half mile home. All I could do for the first couple of hours afterward was lay in bed and pray for sleep to hit me out of nowhere at 8:00 pm.  My life-long insomnia will make sure that never happens, but I keep hoping anyway.  The alternative is just to let go and the world roll around me like huge, long waves undulating like low hills on a horizon. 

If I hope for sleep, I can pretend everything is back to being still, and safe, and un-nauseated.