If you leave aside joints that ache or are in need of replacement, I've been a pretty healthy person all my life. Oh — and you also have to leave out my first twelve years. Back then, I was sick an awful lot of the time, including missing an entire semester of elementary school due to Scarlet Fever. Scarlet Fever is, as its very name would suggest, a very nasty thing to have.
So are chronic, crippling stomach cramps often accompanied by violent seizures and vomiting. Quite apart from the Scarlet Fever, I had a fair amount of them in my early years and in some sense, the stomach problems were even worse. At least my pediatrician was able to identify the Scarlet Fever so he knew how to treat it. The tummy cramps mystified everyone. I went through test after test and at one point, they even took out my appendix. It was somewhat inflamed and they thought that might be the cause. As it turned out, my appendix did need to be removed but doing that did nothing to stop the occasional explosions of my belly.
My pediatrician was a fine, wonderful man named Dr. Arthur Grossman. He got me through the Scarlet Fever and other childhood diseases…like when I had the measles. This was back before skillful vaccinations had pretty much eliminated measles as a deadly communicable disease in our world. That was sure a great thing. I'm so glad parents today are all wise enough to get their kids vaccinated.
The only thing wrong with Dr. Grossman was that he wasn't part of the in-house network of the Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance plan. My father worked for the Internal Revenue Service and when I was nine or so, they offered a super bargain deal to the families of federal employees.
It was too good not to grab and my parents were both on it for the rest of their lives, paying a lot less and getting more for their money than if they'd switched to any other health insurance available, including plans Kaiser has offered since. When my mother had her cataract surgery at age 85, she got a flawless operation for a $5 co-pay. I had to pay seven bucks in the parking lot to pick her up after it.
So it was a great health plan…but it meant I could no longer go see Dr. Grossman. Then again, I was getting a bit old to be going to a pediatrician.
What I thought would be my last visit to him occurred a week before our Kaiser plan kicked in. That was when he suggested that my appendix might have to go. Two weeks later on my first visit to a Kaiser physician, I got a second opinion that was in agreement and the surgery was scheduled. My father saved a bundle over what it would have cost to remove that pesky vestigial organ a few weeks earlier.
But as good as the Kaiser doctors were, the stomach cramps mystified them too. I was having one or two small attacks a week and about every three months, I had one that was so awful, my folks would rush me back to Kaiser where some baffled medico would wrack his board-certified brain for what it might be. After a year or two of tests there failed to identify the problem, my mother had a wise longshot idea. Even though it would mean paying for a visit, she wanted to take me back to Dr. Grossman. Why? Because she didn't know what else to do and he was the wisest doctor she'd ever met.
He was also the nicest as proven by the fact that he never sent us a bill for that visit but, bless him, he did give us the solution. My mother had obtained a copy of my medical records from Kaiser and my former pediatrician reviewed all the tests they'd done. Some stray comment one of the examiners had written caused Doc Grossman's stethoscope or something to light up. "I should have thought of this years ago," he said. "We need to have Mark tested for food allergies." Kaiser had such experts but on his recommendation, we paid outta-pocket to go to an esteemed Beverly Hills specialist he knew.
I don't recall the exact numbers but they went something like this: They tested me for 40 common foods and I had a bad reaction to around twenty-eight of them. In some cases, it was not an allergy but an intolerance and if you want to know the difference between them, read this. From the standpoint of me telling people I can't eat certain things, it's pretty much the same thing so I say "I'm allergic to that" when a more correct statement might be "I have a food intolerance to that."
Further tests were done and at some point, I was handed off to the Kaiser experts. But I immediately began limiting my consumption to foods the tests indicated I could eat…and the stomach aches went away. Or at least when they happened, I knew why. My well-known aversion to cole slaw comes from the fact that it does real, real bad things to me.
In the (roughly) 55 years since I was properly diagnosed, I've had — this is a guess — about thirty tiny episodes and ten modest ones. I've also had — this is the actual count — four serious ones, none of them lately.
This article is the first of at least two parts, maybe more. The next part will will tell you how I learned to handle the problem most of the time and what caused the thirty tiny episodes, the ten modest ones and the four serious ones. In a number of cases, it was Mark Being Stupid, which has also been the cause of any number of calamities that did not involve food.
By the way: The visit to Dr. Grossman wherein he figured out my problem might be food allergies was not the last time I saw the man. I told that story a number of years ago on this blog. It's here just in case you weren't already a huge fan of The Legendary Dr. Grossman.
