#RedactedScience #Excerpt
This is where I started my book...I added a couple preliminary chapters after the Cleveland Clinic visit.
1995 – “One Thing Leads to Another…”
It all started with a new job in a new town. After earning my Chemical Engineering degree, I spent a couple years as a pipeline engineer. Around that time, I was deciding between law school, med
school, or business school. I chose an MBA and landed a job with a company transitioning into a
startup — not the tech kind we know today, but something close for Oklahoma in the mid-90s. It
was still “cool.”
The office had free pop and juice. That was part of the startup vibe. [This is your early warning, dearreader: I’ll spare you as many bodily details as I can, but this story is built around electrolytes — how you get them and how you lose them. So, yes, there will be some pee and poop.] The office was freezing — the kind of place where the AC never took a day off, and you always needed a jacket, no matter the season. I had sworn off sugary drinks, but somehow I found myself constantly sipping on the free juice and soda like they were hydrating me.
Then things started getting weird — not
catastrophic, just strange enough that I noticed. I felt like I had a UTI or something. Not painful,
exactly — just off. So I figured, hey, new city, new job, new insurance... might as well get a new
doctor.
He was probably around my age now — 55. He brought me into his personal office. Wooden
furniture, carpeted floors — a far cry from what passes for medicine today. We talked. It turned out we were both runners. It really felt like we bonded a little.
He gave me a urinalysis and prescribed antibiotics. The urinalysis came back clean. Then came the diarrhea. He switched me to a different antibiotic — pretty sure that one was Cipro. And if you've never had Cipro, let me tell you — it's not subtle. It's a fluoroquinolone, potent enough to
nuke a wide range of bacteria, and infamous for its side effects. You don’t just take Cipro — you
endure it.
That didn’t solve it either, so he prescribed Donnatal, a combination drug with
phenobarbital and hyoscyamine, a drug used for irritable bowel issues. It’s basically a smooth
muscle relaxer, designed to calm the gut. And for a day or two, it worked.
Then the burning began. My stomach was on fire all the time. He wasn’t worried. He had a new acid-reducing drug — a PPI, short for proton pump inhibitor. Supposedly better than the older H2 blockers like Zantac. This one shut down acid production at the source. It was the hot new thing in GI medicine, and yeah, it worked… briefly.
Briefly, as in a day or two. But now I was on an antibiotic, a stomach pill, and an acid reducer — and nothing was helping. The pain never stopped.
Next Stop, GI Doc
In 1995, when they scoped my stomach during that first wave of collapse, the gastro looked at the screen, paused, and said, “Your stomach is entirely covered in small ulcerations. It looks like the stomach of a 70-year-old.” Then he hit the button. Rolled to the next patient. I was 26. No answers, no flags, just a prescription and a shrug. Years later I got access to procedure data — who does what, and how often — and sure enough, my GI doc was at the top of the list in Tulsa.
Makes sense.
Procedures pay.
Explaining why a healthy 26-year-old’s stomach looks like he’s been through three wars?
That’s unpaid labor.
🔥👆 Science is Redacted!
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