The greatest thing to happen in years happened this week. Greater than love, greater than friendship, greater than a sports championship, greater than music, books, movies and sex.
I started beta-blockers.
On vacation.
It was supposed to be an overnight trip to see my favorite conductor and favorite orchestra play my favorite piece of music. A train up, one night in Boston, then a train home. Two glasses of wine in some bar while talking to some guy and our bartendress about... what did we talk about? Then back to my hotel room.
Then on the way home, the train stopped in New Haven. Apparently power had gone out in Manhattan's Penn Station. No trains were coming in or going out. Nearly everybody else of the thousand passengers left the train, able to travel locally through Grand Central Station which would honor their tickets on another train. But being the passenger with the farthest distance to travel, I had to stay onboard and for two-and-a-half hours I did. Finally, with no end in sight, almost out of food, I went out into the train station.
I immediately realized there were two options: catch another train, or take my first genuine vacation of a distance past Philadelphia in... I don't want to say... No matter how much my stomach blew up to Veruca Salt-like proportions, I would take the risk.
And so I did what I'd been loathe to do and start regularly taking those beta blockers I've been supposed to take every day since late November. Not for belly bloat, but for heart issues.
And yet the 10 I took it before this week, the biggest impact it had was not on my heart but my stomach, or at least once it had that impact on New Year's Eve. But I never really thought it did again.
Until New Haven! I could eat! I could drink wine! I could go on vacations like a halfway normal person. For three days I went around Yale University, the closest thing America has to a gothic village like Bruges or Avignon where you can picture having a royal wedding then murder your in-laws.
New Haven, full of Yale professors with nothing to do, is one of the best culinary towns in America. Not only is the food amazing, but the nutritional content is listed everywhere. There was barely a place where I was left unnotified of all the ingredients, even before ordering. All the problems and fears of ordering in Baltimore restaurants were nowhere to be found in this leisure resort for smart people. Simple things my body could not keep down were suddenly digested with no trouble: hard cheeses, chocolate, butter, even things I wasn't able to have for years as simple as cucumber and greek yogurt were able to be kept down. Even the carbonation of kombucha did not affect me, and it began to have the stomach settling effect everyone promised.
It's the ultimate proof that ten years' trouble is nothing more in fact than EXTREME visceral hypersensitivity. One full pill every day with eleven refills. Suddenly, my stomach doesn't blow up for more than a few minutes at a time, and for the first time in three years I don't have to eat only six things. Technically I'm still on the same diet, but I'm actually on the diet properly and not just checking ingredients for a hundred things I can't eat lest my stomach turn to Falstaff.
It doubtless may create it's own problems, but if this problem can be dealt with, every other problem is easy in comparison. I can keep losing weight. I can plan meals, I can get to the gym five days a week and turn whatever fat's left over to muscle. Here is the hope we all need that with proper application, problems will eventually be solved.
I've had the pills for a while, but I haven't quite believed in them because... well... for something that's supposed to calm your heart it seemed to create other heart issues, but I'm assured that's a pain in a nerve, not heart. so if I die next week, just know I died fairly happy and hopeful.
On the other hand, if I die next week, it probably won't be from heart issues: at least not directly. It would be from an abscess I'm pretty sure I developed while on vacation after scratching a skin tag too hard in a train bathroom. Today when finally home and finished with a prescribed antibiotic, I had it cleaned. I was told to go to the hospital if it grows back, and now I find myself debating whether or not to go. They didn't tell me what it might be, but I made the mistake of looking up the symptoms, and the abscess is in an area where sepsis becomes a genuine possibility.
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