I've been sitting, half-reclined in bed for hours, lying horribly to myself. I keep thinking that the acid stomach will eventually dissipate, that water will dilute it, that it's just a matter of time like everything else. Nope. It's eating me alive just like it has been most of the summer. My entire system has been off balance, and I'm experiencing discomforts that I had convinced myself I had conquered years ago. I started taking acid reducers when I was a teenager. By the time I was a freshman in college, I was making Woody Allen type self-deprecating jokes about how much Tagamet I took. By the time I was in my 30s, I started looking for changes in my diet I could make to stop doing this. For the last decade, doctors have been trying to throw Zantac and Prilosec at me and I have am so over it, I completely refuse to take them.
At least, I had managed to refuse them until I went into this hard core treatment this summer. The acid stomach and accompanying reflux is wearing me down. I miss a lot of sleep, which sounds weird to say from a woman who has spend most of the last three months in bed. But really, as I type this paragraph, it is almost 1:15 in the morning, and I have been here for over two hours waiting for the heartburn to let up just enough for me to think clearly to blog. It never gave up. It doesn't matter if I eat or don't eat, if the food I choose is bland, spicy, acidic, or basic. When my older daughter was here, she convinced me to take antacid tablets, and left me her glovebox bottle of them. I've taken several over the last few days, to no avail. The acid just gets stronger. So just now, I got up and dug through the remnants of drugs that have moved with me a couple of times, and took a Zantac. (Yes, it was expired. Lay off, I was desperate.) If I'm lucky, it will chill things out enough that I can sleep by about 2 am or so.
I had a little more energy today, enough to have a wonderful morning chat with my bestie who was down for the weekend with her kids. She was here for about two hours over early morning coffee, long enough to drive home how much I have missed her. But that was as much as I could do for quite a while. I kept trying to walk around the house, inside and out. I made myself eggs for breakfast, which turned out to be quite an effort. I kept trying to talk to the Man as he pulled weeds and mowed the lawn. But when he told me all I had to do was mark the plywood for the table and he and T would go ahead and cut it for me while they were doing table saw work, I discovered how little energy I really had. Or maybe it was strength, more accurately. I couldn't hold both the tape measure and the pen. I couldn't hold the square flat against the wood to run the pen down it. I fumbled and shook and staggered. I had to give up and trust that the short line I had drawn before I dropped everything would serve as enough of a guide for them to cut what I wanted. They took over and did the muscle and finesse work I couldn't, and now I have to wait and hope I'm strong enough to run a belt sander by myself soon.
Fifteen minutes into the Zantac, and I'm still waiting. Maybe I'll stop and see what's on YouTube. That Pottery Throw Down it keeps suggesting is pretty interesting. It should see me through until dawn, if the Zantac never works.
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