A metaphor-filled post Rosh Hashana Post

This week’s mail has just been a bundle of calories. First the 1.4 formula of Kate Farms arrived and then the calorie-packed Benecalorie finally showed up. It had taken a detour through Plattsburgh, which is why it took so long to get to me.

The 1.4 formula is just a tiny-bit more viscous than the regular formula. But it feels like it is much heavier than that. I also noticed that on days when I only ate the 1.4 formula, I wasn’t eating any solid food because the formula kept me so full all day. One might say that just sticking to the 1.4 formula is the best bang for the buck from a caloric perspective, anyway. Just skip the solid food.

However, my nutritionist recently introduced a new mind-blowing (and I am not saying that facetiously) concept to me. And that is eating for the sake of pleasure.

I come from a family where all food had its own valence. I don’t remember a time when every bite wasn’t weighted with the “dire” consequence of gaining weight. When I was 16, it all came to be too overwhelming. I stopped being able to distinguish “good” foods from “bad” foods, and I just stopped eating at all. Even today, with gastroparesis, my first response to stress is to stop eating.

One of the weirdest, and certainly most ironic, aspect of this disease is how it has shifted my perspective on calories a full 180°. Calories, in any form, are now universally good. After a year and a half, I am still not used to it. Yet eating remains fraught for me. I expend a lot of energy every day doing my best to get as many calories in me as possible without overwhelming my body and rendering me essentially non-functional. And that doesn’t factor in the nausea that comes with ingesting anything (more on that in a moment).

With that background, you can hopefully understand why the prospect of eating for pleasure was so foreign to me. Nevertheless, my nutritionist’s point resonated with me instantly. This disease has taken so much pleasure from my life. I haven’t been able to craft since that one good day. And a formerly very much anticipated delivery of my fiber subscription just made me sad. For me, eating solid food no longer has much purpose for anything but pleasure. So please be clear, solid food is not going away unless my body (please body no, don’t do this) tells me so.

Tomorrow, after I finish my open container of 1.4 formula, I am going to go back to the original formula and see if integrating the Benecalorie goes better.

Today my acupuncturist asked me to describe the nausea I now get from drinking anything. I had explained to him that it felt different than my standard, with me all the time nausea. That is when I realized that just as any good Oregonian would immediately understand the difference between a mist, a drizzle and a sprinkle of rain (at least before climate change started really messing with our seasons), I had come to learn that there is more than one descriptor for nausea.

There is my “always there” nausea. This is the only nausea that ever goes into sleep mode. But it is always there, lurking. All it takes is brushing against my abdomen, lifting my leg at the hip (like to sit) or the pressure from elasticized or clingy clothes to wake it right up. Then it unrolls like a spiral outward, starting from roughly where my stomach sits. Think pinwheel spinner.

The nausea I get after I swallow a sip of liquid, is like a lead ball being dropped into my gut. Immediately following, like a splash, a curtain of nausea rises from about my belly button to my solar plexus.

Then there is the “oops, I ingested too much” nausea. This one can only be triggered by eating solid food. It takes about 20 minutes after I eat something before I can feel how it will sit in my stomach. I have gotten pretty good at guestimating what I can handle. Sometimes, I guess wrong and eat more than my stomach can handle. Then I feel a pressure pushing down from about my solar plexus to my bellybutton. And that nausea flows down, like when you put a lid on on overly full pot.

Vomiting is common with gastroparesis, but fortunately it is a symptom that I have been spared. My personal, not run by any medical professional theory is that I don’t vomit because my stomach muscles are too paralyzed for reverse peristalsis.