I keep forgetting to put this down, probably because I’m always glad when an episode is over, but for the last few months, I’ve been suffering from bouts of abdominal pains. They don’t often seem related to food intake, even though my digestive system is somehow involved.
The earliest episode I can remember dates back to when I was kept in Baptist hospital under observation, around December 2016. My whole system was screwed up back then, and I wasn’t eating solid food, but one evening it came out of nowhere and didn’t want to end. It was so strong only a dose of morphine stopped the pain. I was extremely grateful that it did, and I haven’t had anything like it until perhaps a year ago.
I didn’t make a note of the date, but I remember it was during the night. We had eaten may hours before, and sometime around 3am I woke up and had this dull pain that stretched from the waist up to just above my belly button. It doesn’t quite extend to the sides and seems to be focused in the centre. It’s that type of pain that has kept coming back more frequently, and not just at night.
Today is a great example, which is why I thought I’ll make some more detailed notes. I woke up and had a protein shake with coconut milk at around 9am, like I often do, and have never had any issues afterwards. Around noon, the episode started and got gradually worse over the next 20 minutes. We had a walk to see if it would help, but moving around only aggravates whatever this is. Around an hour and a bit later the pain began to fade and took another hour to dissipate completely. I had no other digestive issues, like heart burn or erratic bowel movements, quote the opposite.
Around 8pm we had dinner, which consisted of a tomato salad with tuna and a bowl of chips (i.e. oven fries), something I’ve had countless times before without issues. Like clockwork, an hour or so later the same abdominal pain started happening, not quite as strong as in the morning, but definitely enough to make me think of having some ibuprofen (which I didn’t take in the end).
It feels like I have some food trapped somewhere and it can’t get through, much like it felt before my sigmoid colon tumour was removed. That was much lower down than this, and I could literally feel the place of congestion, unlike here, where I can’t locate anything like an obstruction. While today it appears to be directly related to food intake, it hasn’t seem like that on many previous and especially nightly occasions. Those episodes appear many hours after we’ve eaten, so this thing can come at any time and can be kicked off pretty much unannounced.
The last episode before today was last week, and as a result I abstained from any food the next day until the evening. It worked well and didn’t come back, until today. I’ll start making posts if and when it happens again to keep an eye on the frequency, which has definitely increased over the last year. As a guess, these things seem to happen about once a month, and have now increased to once every two weeks, perhaps more.
Sometimes, like today on both occasions, the phenomenon is accompanied by mild sweat on my forehead.
Let’s hope it’s nothing serious and I’m just