Posted on 05/11/2008 9:08:19 PM PDT by neverdem
Diagnosis
1. Symptoms
The doctor found his 20 year-old son in the bathroom sprawled over the toilet. “Not again?” he asked gently. The young man nodded, tears bright in his eyes, as he rose slowly to his feet. He pressed his hand deeply into his own abdomen, as if holding something in place. “It’s getting worse.”
The father was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. “Get dressed,” he told his son suddenly. If they rushed to the hospital, maybe they would be lucky enough to catch whatever was causing this pain on an X-ray. The young man had already been imaged a half-dozen times, but never during an attack. But a short time later, as they walked down a quiet hospital hallway, he turned to his father. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “The pain is gone.” As it had so often in the past, the attack ended the way it started — suddenly. The X-ray was normal.
The young man’s father, a gastroenterologist, had been trying to figure out the cause of these terrible episodes for months. He was tormented by the possibility that he might have missed something. It was, he thought, time to send his son to another doctor, and so he called an old friend and internist, Andrew Israel.
Israel was shocked by how much weight the young man had lost since he’d last seen him. As he hugged him he could feel the bony knobs of his spine beneath his thin shirt. The young man began to describe the strange pain that had come from nowhere and dominated his life for the past three months. It was a tearing, burning pain, always in the upper-left side of his abdomen. And it would come on suddenly — often just after he ate. These excruciating attacks would last...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thanks for posting that. Very interesting.
Thanks for posting this....Yorkie you need to read the link..hugs Pandy
After all of the pain that the MSM publishes, we have other stories. There are stories of inspiration out there. For Mothers” Day, I posted this one
A Well-deserved Tribute to a Special Mother
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2014538/posts
Thanks for the link.
When my daughter was about 8 years old she was getting stomach aches that became so bad she was hospitalized.
The doctors pored over her for three days. Her pediatrician did not want anything invasive done to her.
The pain subsided and she was released from the hospital.
A few weeks later I read a newspaper article about sugarless gum containing aspartame causing gas and stomach aches.
Problem solved. No more sugarless gum for her.
When I started to read that article today I thought sure that’s what the diagnosis would be. Who would have thought that it would be such a rare malady.
Fascinating. Thanks for the ping.
Very interesting. Thanks for that information, diefree.
Health/life BUMP!
So what is it? NYT demands registration.
NYT registration is free. If you don't want to, check http://www.bugmenot.com/
If you weren’t able to get it online I still have the Magazine section and I can type it up for you.
I managed to find out. Thanks anyway.
A friend’s son had something like that happen to him. He ended up with an intestinal obstruction due to some structure in his intestine that was supposed to go away during infancy or some time very young, and it didn’t. It later twisted and tied a knot in his intestine and resulted in a section of his intestine dying off and needing to be removed. He ended up in the hospital with emergency surgery for it more than once because of complications and had a pretty rough time of it.
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