I was sitting in the front seat of my dad's green dodge Intrepid when I spotted his orange-flavored Certs on the dashboard. He had just buckled me in to bring me to my Nonnie's house so he and my mom could go out for the night. (Nonnie is what I call my grandmother if you couldn't have guessed that already.) Me with my nimble seven-year-old fingers carefully unwrapped the silver paper around the mints and peeled it away in tiny curly-cue strips. One by one, I popped them into my mouth and chewed them up, almost impervious to how they tasted until I reached the bottom of the pack.
When we arrived at Nonnie's house a few minutes later, all was well. I had a video about horses that my mom had rented for me. I promptly pushed it into the VCR and watched. Soon, I began to feel a sick rumbling in my stomach. I had never experienced something so gross in my gut before. After a while, sitting up was unbearable. I grabbed a big blue pillow and laid face down on the floor while my movie played innocently in the background. I hated the bile curdling feeling and forced myself to sleep it away. I don't remember my parents coming to pick me up that night. All I remember is waking up next to my mom in my parents' bed and feeling a sickening urgency. My mom rushed me out of bed and down the hallway. I vomited all the way to the bathroom on the other side of the house. I was in such shock. I never wanted to feel that way again. The next morning, I sat in my nightgown on the wood floor and inspected the cracks for remnants of vomit from the night before. I swear I found some and believed it would always be stuck in the cracks.
After that night, I developed a fear of eating. I was afraid that if I ate too much of anything, I would puke it up again. Irrational, yes. But as a seven-year-old, nothing could be more serious. My anxiety about vomiting manifested itself into constant upset stomachs, loss of appetite, and so many sick days from school, I barely set food in the third or fourth grade. My parents were constantly bringing me to the pediatrician who over countless visits without diagnosis recommended that I see a specialist at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Sitting in the waiting room of my doctor's crowded little office became a dreaded routine for me. As I sat cramped on my dad's lap, leafing through old "Highlights" magazines, my mind raced with the heinous possibilties I may have to endure that day. I silenetly pleaded that he would not schedule some invasive procedure or test for later on that day like a lower GI or Colonoscopy. I didn't know the technical names of these "tests". I just knew they were very unpleasant and that I hated trips to Boston because of it. I felt it was unfair to put me into such procedures so blindly and without any mental preparation.
When he called me and my family in, my stomach would lurch as I walked past rows of file cabinets and optimistic posters of clowns and whales. I'd sit on the crinkly white paper on the exam table as he'd gently tap and press down on different points of my stomach while listening in with a stethoscope. Visit after visit I reported the same thing: no appetite. Sometimes this was accompanied by diarrhea or actual stomach aches, but mostly I didn't feel like eating. My stomach after months deprived of a good meal must have shriveled up into a tiny vacuum. A few years and many medications later, a Nasal Gastric (NG) Tube was suggested. I agreed, scared, but after a lot of reassurance thought, "How bad can this be?"
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