Diagnosis 1

So, I went for my gastroscopy yesterday. Not fun! Although certainly bearable. I was given anesthesia for the 10 minutes it takes but I could still feel the thing that was in my mouth. I have no idea what it looked like but I can tell you that it pressed pretty hard on my throat. I tried to move it with my tongue and someone - the nurse I should think - kept wanting to press it right back. She had the advantage of being concious so she won. The most upleasant part was when the tube is pulled out - I think that's what it was.

I now then have a diagnosis. It's the one I knew to expect i.e. I have GERD (which I will from now on call geraldine) commonly known as reflux disease. In my case there's a small hiatal hernia which in itself would not be much of a problem but the fact that my esophageal sphincter - the latin derived terms are way more cool than the Finnish ones, by the way - doesn't do it's job. At all!

Well, it does, but it is doing a very poor job which means that in my case I have the disease pretty bad. Considering that I've taken very strong medicine for my stomach for the past four months and with it still frequently have bad days with my stomach this was not news.

However, I was upset. I knew to expect the diagnosis. And I am extremely thankful that there was nothing more serious happening anywhere in there. But this is a chronic disease. It cannot be healed since the cause of it is unknown. It's basically a functional problem.

There is an operation that could be done but in a lot of cases it doesn't work. The esophageal sphincter cannot be replaced and the solution there is, very often quite simply stops working. Within four years people are back on medication. If I start to have even more problems with my voice and throat I will have to consider the operation but for now the odds aren't particularily inviting.

Having geraldine means that I have reoccuring stomach pains which usually are worst at night when I lay down and reflux really gets to kick in. At times these can be traced back to what I ate but nowadays not too often anymore. The amount of things I cannot eat has expanded quite a bit from the original spice allergy restrictions. The hard part is that there is no predictability with this -which is of course the case with any illness. There are days when everything is ok and then there are weeks like this one when nothing seems to help calm down my angry stomach. It just keeps boiling.

I will learn to live with geraldine. I have no other option. But for now 24 hrs after having gotten the diagnosis I'm not quite there yet. I now know that I'm going to have a life of stomach pains and throat problems and there is no real cure for them. Untill now I had always thought that there could be a cure or that if I ate just right I could prevent them. Now I know I can't. The last months have proven that. To put it bluntly stomach troubles suck royally and chronic ones suck even more. Can you tell I'm upset?

I wrote in facebook that I have to loose weight. This is the reason. It's not that I should, I have to. It will not cure me but it will mean less preassure on my stomach which in it's turn should help a little. I've started and during the first 9 days I lost 1,8 kilos which is in fact too much too soon. Given that I am almost 20 kilos overweight I'm not too conserned if the first kilos drop a bit faster. I'm sure the pace will calm down on its own once my body realizes I mean business.