Eating disorder

A bum came up to me on the street and said he hadn't had a bite in a week.

So I bit him!

This joke has been around longer than dirt. Some people find it funny. Some people think it's not funny because it makes fun of bums. Me? I think it's not funny because I haven't had a bite in a week.

That's only a very slight exaggeration. But today marks a full week since I've been able to eat in the normal sense.

This all started, quite inconveniently, on my birthday. Since that morning, I've had virtually no appetite whatsoever. I feel full -- too full -- all the time. It's uncomfortable. I've been surviving on liquids: mostly ginger ale and gatorade, with some tea, both hot and iced. Yesterday, for example, my diet consisted of ginger ale, tea, four gummy bears, a slice of bread, and about three bites of pasta. At no point during this time did I actually feel hungry; I ate because I figured it was a good idea.

I saw my physician on Monday. He suspected it might be a stomach infection picked up from the last meal I ate (more on that later), and put me on an antibiotic in case it's bacterial. He also ordered blood tests and recommended that I see a gastroenterologist who happened to be in the same building.

I managed to get an appointment with the GI doc for today (Wednesday), probably due to a cancellation. He turned out to be a rather useless individual, spending a total of about ninety seconds with me and offering the sagely advice to stick with a bland diet and come back in a week if I'm not better. His Physician's Assistant, however, was kinder and spent time understanding my situation and offering advice. She also gave me some free samples of a prescription antacid, deserving of its own digression...

Somewhere, in a cubicle inside the headquarters of a giant pharmaceutical company, sits a copywriter who missed the day of kindergarten when they taught phonics. In fact, several layers of management must also have flunked phonics, in order to let this slip by. Either that, or they were all "in" on the joke and I simply fail to share their sense of humor. For you see, dear reader, some giant pharmaceutical company saw fit to release an antacid called Aciphex. Seriously. A medicine for digestive problems that is pronounced virtually identically to "ass-effects".

So that's the deal. I haven't felt hungry in a week. Each day of the past week, The Boy (17 months) has undoubtedly consumed more calories than his Daddy. And the strangest part of all: despite all this, I've only lost a little weight, and I still have a reasonable amount of energy -- all the more surprising since I've avoided caffeine throughout this whole episode. I am surviving on ginger ale, with a slice of bread or (that's OR, not AND) some applesauce each day.

Oh, and about that meal that might have been the culprit: I'll continue to eat at tex-mex restaurants. I'll even happily go back to the same tex-mex restaurant that started all this. But tex-mex restaurants, my friends, are not the place to order grilled tuna. (In this case, served over a caesar salad - the very notion of which turns my bloated stomach every time I think of it.)