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.