Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It’s a new day in America. And everywhere else. Happy Easter to one and all.
Feeling particularly bright this morning because for the first time since last June’s miserable surgery, I woke up without a bellyache and without a lump in the throat. And though the 3 a.m. alarm clock went off as usual, it was not to wake me up to enjoy another wee-hours bout of heartburn. 🙂
To what do I attribute this miraculous turn of events? To a little help from my friends…
Not those friends, but their prescription cousins.
I’ve been gulping horsepills of omeprazole in double the OTC dose. That seemed not to be working, but apparently because I was knocking off them too soon.
As you know, I have a moral objection to being put on prescription drugs for the rest of my life, which of course is what every doctor you run into has in mind. So as soon as the symptoms would fade, I would fade off the omeprazole.
The other day, Young Dr. Kildare explained why this doesn’t work: The symptoms of gastric reflux stem from something like a burn to your esophagus, resulting from acid bubbling up where it’s not supposed to be. If you burned your hand, you could apply a topical treatment and it would feel better, but it wouldn’t be healed. You’d have to wait until it actually was healed to stop using the painkiller and before you could bang around again. Ditto, your innards.
He said you need to take prescription-strength omeprazole (or something like it) for about three months, even after the discomfort abates, and then, once you think the damage is healed, taper off it by going to the OTC pills for a week or two.
The new quacklet at the Mayo (oh, these young things! How can you have acquired an MD, gone through an internship and a residency, and look like you’re 19 years old???) agreed, although her time frame was shorter: eight weeks.
YDK has GERD himself, and also he’s not a kid (even though he looks mighty young to the aged eye), so I figure he’s probably the one to listen to. He having been around the block a time or two…
So I’ve been swallowing omeprazole religiously for about a week or ten days.
Then I discovered Zantac, OTC. This stuff, which in the past has done nothing for me, seems to work to beat back an acute attack, but only when used in combination with omeprazole. It dawned on me that if it worked during the day, it probably would work at three in the morning. So I put a pill and a glass of water by the bed, and night before last when I woke up with the familiar tingling/burning sensation that results from rolling over on my right side in my sleep, dropped the Zantac.
Took about 20 minutes to work, but it did work. And the next morning I wasn’t very sick. Somewhat so, but not to the usual extent.
I haven’t had a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a bourbon and water, a salad, a still-crisp vegetable, or so much as a whiff of chili pepper in weeks. So I can assure you, depriving yourself of the things you love doesn’t help. Neither do the various folks and quack remedies. No, swallowing organic apple cider vinegar does not help. Neither does ginger. Neither do Gaviscon, Rolaids, Mylanta, or Maalox.
In the nondrug department, only one thing seems to calm the symptoms of GERD: vanilla ice cream.
Yes. I don’t even LIKE ice cream, but I’ve been living on it for weeks.
The other day I reflected on the reason for this, ad it occurred to me it’s probably because ice cream is essentially a liquid. Effectively I’ve put myself on a liquid diet.
So I decided to branch out to other fluids.
Those soups that come in boxes all taste terrible to me: they taste like their cardboard containers. However, they’re less oversalted than the Campbell’s varieties. And no, I do not feel like making soup just now. Ugh. So I bought some chicken broth, some lamb broth, some mushroom soup, and some pumpkin soup. They all taste the same: cardboard. But they don’t seem to cause direct pain. Probably today I should go over to Trader’s on the way home from the churchly frenzy and pick up some chicken that I can make into real soup. Chicken à blanc…hold the onions. {sigh} Onion: that’s another beloved food item I haven’t had in weeks.
I’m wondering if a puréed lentil or bean soup might work…again, I can’t imagine how these would taste without onion. But WTF? It’s probably better than living on ice cream.
Yesterday I baked an Idaho potato. Served it up with some yogurt, figuring that would add some protein. A whole potato was too much to eat, but it seems to have worked to fill the belly without causing undue discomfort. Dined on this around 2:30 in the afternoon and wasn’t hungry till I got back from last night’s Great Vigil frenzy, along about 9:30 at night.
And this morning, trying to imagine what is essentially liquid and also edible, I recalled that my mother used to eat apple sauce when she didn’t feel well. I personally am not crazy about the apple sauce that comes in jars. However…quite a few apples are laying around the kitchen, waiting to spoil because I can’t eat them. Why not bake an apple?
That worked pretty well. I’m now not hungry and not in pain. Interesting.
So what am I gonna do this evening, when I have to go out for an Easter feast with friends? I certainly can’t eat any feasty foods. It’s going to look mighty funny when I ask for a bowl of soup for dinner. No clue how to cope with that. Guess I’ll have to play it as it lays.
How to Bake an Apple
You need:
• 1 apple, variety seems inconsequential
• butter
• brown sugar, turbinado sugar, or whatever sugar you have in the house
• cinnamon, if you have some
• pecans or walnuts, if desired
• hot water
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
With a paring knife, cut off the stem and a cone of apple around the it. Loosen the apple flesh by carefully slicing around the outside of the core. Take the handle of a metal spoon and scoop out the core and seeds.
Fill the hole with butter. Push in some pecans or walnuts, if you like. Top with sugar. Sprinkle a little cinnamon over it, if you wish.
Place the apple in a shallow baking dish. Pour in a little hot water, about a half-inch up the side of the pan.
Bake for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how soft you like your apple. If you like it a little firm, take it out of the oven after about a half-hour. If you want apple sauce, baking for an hour will do the trick.
Very tasty! A heckuva lot better than canned apple sauce!