“You Can’t Treat Me That Way:” The Gut Speaks

Part I, Chapter 5

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From my book, Unsolicited Advice: A Consent Educator's (Canceled) Memoir, only on Substack.

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March 7, 2021

Sunday

9:49am

I was up at 6:45 TO WALK MY NEW DOG!!! She still hasn’t peed though. I brought her home yesterday and she hasn’t peed since 1:30. The cats are acclimating really well. I named her Tennessee because the rescuer named her Stella which reminded me of Streetcar [Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams].

March 17, 2021

Wednesday

7:49pm

Tennessee ran away yesterday. We found her 5 hours later. It was one of the most harrowing experiences I’ve ever had. Mom was walking her while I had my doctor’s appointment at UCLA and she got out of her collar and bolted east on Wilshire Boulevard. Poor mom had to tell me she lost my dog. I walked out of the house screaming and hyperventilating, “How could I let this happen?!” I had only had her collar on, not the harness, and I had almost put it on but I didn’t because of the cone I got so she’d stop licking her spay scar. Mom suggested I leave my information at the country club in case she ran into the golf course, and that’s who called me. I had gone home to print fliers and register her microchip, so mom and Lillie went to pick her up.

TN is back and so sweet and now I’m fully attached. What a good dog I have.

I had been chronically ill all my life without a diagnosis. Doctors had told me I was too thin and just needed to eat more. They assumed I was a victim of societal beauty standards, having grown up in LA in the era of Baywatch. But I hated how thin I was, how small, how I was always mistaken for so much younger than I was. I had always slept as much as I could, the first asleep at parties after gorging on cake, pizza, and ice cream, which I never really wanted, a trait I got made fun of for. When asked, I’d always say my favorite food was steak. This is still true.

For my first kiss, I was asleep on a couch in the middle of a living room during a rager and woke up to a kid from high school who went by Young Thirsty kissing me and someone taking a polaroid. I don’t know where that photo went.

In college, I had eczema all over my face and was given a topical steroid. I used it most days for years. Later another doctor told me this was bad form on that doctor’s part, that I shouldn’t have used it more than once a month, and had likely done irreparable damage to my skin. He gave me a new cream that didn’t work. I saw yet another doctor who gave a cream the size of my index finger to last me about a month. With insurance it was $360. I knew I had to find the cause, not bandaid the symptoms anymore.

Several people suggested I stop eating gluten and see if it helped. I was devastated. Concerned more with how I’d be perceived than how I felt, I didn’t want to be the person eating a burger with a fork and knife and no bun with a side salad. I didn’t want to be “that girl.” I tried cutting out gluten and within four days my eczema and cystic acne went away, I went from sleeping 10-12 hours a day to 7 and a half and waking up energized with no alarm, I was able to go off my antidepressants, my social anxiety evaporated, and the brain fog cleared. I was a new me. But other problems persisted and eventually got worse after several bouts of food poisoning, four UTI’s and a yeast infection in one year resulting in four rounds of antibiotics, and chronic and acute stress from two different relationships in which I put my needs aside for someone else who “had it worse than me.” Always a savior, I was. It gave me purpose and a way to forget myself.

At the beginning of 2019, I found a doctor who actually believed me. He didn’t tell me I was “just anorexic” or ask me, “Who else in your family has the crazy?” He told me he thought I had a severe case of small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), candida, and an MTHFR gene mutation, and diagnosed me with PTSD from my father’s angry outbursts throughout my childhood. The results came in from a plethora of tests. He was right, plus two microscopic parasites. There are two kinds of SIBO and I had both, off the charts.

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