Oh, goody, On September 29 I get to go to Cedars at 6:30 in the morning and swallow a large pill which contains a tiny little movie camera. Over the following eight hours, it’ll create a fascinating and no doubt beautiful travelogue of my stomach and upper intestine.

What we’re doing is looking for other sources of bleeding that could be exacerbating my anemia. My gastroenterologist, my doctor friend Caroline and I all agree that it’s unlikely we will find anything dire down there.

The general consensus is that I’m too fat to have cancer and besides, cancer isn’t a one-symptom (anemia) disease. So I’m trying to remain calm and keep my hands inside the ride at all times.

Perhaps if they give me a copy of the movie I’ll post it here with accompanied by a pretentious, would-be-mysterious pretentious faux Pink Floyd score.

Or not.

So I go in to see the same Gastro who helped me with my anemia when we first discovered it two years ago.  I told him that taking Prilosec and staying away from caffeine, chocolate, alcohol and lying down on a full stomach wasn’t cutting it, as my hemoglobin is now 8.5 (it’s supposed to be 15). 

He said that we had to assume there was another place I was bleeding internally beside the stomach issue we already knew about.  Great.  I reminded him that I was one of those White Coat Hypertension types (scared of everything medical). 

“Here’s what we’re going to do, ” he said.  “You’re going to go into Cedars and swallow this gigantic pill with a camera inside it.  The pill will take movies of your upper intestine and we will look for problems.” 

Great.  I asked him,   “So, like in the colon, are there scary lethal things we can find there in the upper intestine?”  Of course I meant cancer. 

“It’s been two years and anemia is your only symptom and you had a mysterious weight loss [obviously], ” he said.  “Doesn’t sound like cancer.  Sounds like any one of a bunch of benign causes.” 

I informed him that that was the right answer. 

In the meantime, he tripled my iron and gave me a choice of two drugs.  Basically the choice came down to which gastroenterological discomfort would I rather have, diarrhea or constipation?  [Yay.  Welcome to my life.] 

I chose constipation.  Which, for the record, thanks to assiduous extra fiber intake, I have NOT suffered from so far.  

 For a few days I noticed no difference.  In fact, I felt terrible.  Normal walking was a struggle.  Staircases were agony.  Of course, my current gig is, uh, floor support, which, just like it sounds, requires lots of walking.  

I got really blue.  Have I waited too long? I thought.  Have I lost my chance at good health?  Am I doomed to either die young or be unhealthy and feel miserable all the time?  

Then something lovely happened.  I got out of my car Wednesday to walk to the building where I’m working, and I noticed that it wasn’t quite as hard as it had been before.  Maybe the new drug just needed a few days to kick in, I thought. I’ll wait and see tomorrow.  Maybe this is a fluke. 

Thursday morning.  Not a fluke!  I feel even better today.  So now I’m hoping that the drug is helping plug up the hole in my stomach so I can start to accumulate some decent red blood. 

Tomorrow is my birthday.  All I want is some hemoglobin. 

After seeing Dr. Chan, the nice podiatrist, I scurried across town to the x-ray place where I had a pleasant session with what seemed to be a very lonely x-ray technician.  She sent me packing with the pictures of my feet which I was to return to Dr. Chan in a couple of weeks.

Alas, snag!  I’ve been actually Denied clinical orthopedic shoe inserts by my medical insurance company!  I wonder why?  They don’t think heel pain is important?

Snag deux!  Chan put me on Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory, to help with the feet, and boy did it ever help.  Unfortunately it also turned out to be EXACTLY the kind of medicine that wreaks havoc with my poor corroded stomach lining, making my already bad anemia worse.

Exit the Naproxin.  I’ll live with the pain for now.  Hemaglobin is more important.