OH! NO!

A lifelong indiscriminate eater has to change her ways.

I was born to eat anything that was put in front of me. As a hardy soul, I’d consume foot-long hoagies, multiple versions of chili, my mom’s ham and bean soup. Chittlin’ doused with hot sauce. Whole cakes and pies. Mounds of spaghetti. Every bread and pastery imaginable.

Heaven!

This talent was the main reason I was hired to review New York City restaurants. That and my extensive experience as a waitress/short order cook, which augmented my young boss’s knowledge that began and ended with family dinners at expensive restaurants.

My beat was not haute cuisine in fancy restaurants nor the vibrant experimental establishments that began to open in the city’s fashionable downtown corners. It was neighborhood, mom and pop, ethnic, diner-style counter places. That was fine. I knew and loved the food I ate there. Yet, after several years of mandatory eating my way through the lunch and dinner menus, I often came back to the office in severe stomach distress. I found myself in the same state when my boss took me to his restaurants. Food poisoning occasionally cropped up from both establishments.

It was all okay. Part of the job. The office stocked huge bottles of whatever stomach relief we found in the nearby drugstore. Ten years on, the paper folded and I moved on to less dangerous jobs. But the ruined stomach remained and pain became part of my life, nothing to complain about once I learned what foods to avoid. Then again, how can you continuously avoid all the food you love? (Return to the first paragraph.) Isn’t this why there are so many remedies in the stomach relief aisle?

Recently, I changed my primary doctor to a jolly, very thoughtful character who brought a fresh perspective to my health. He placed his hand on my hard, cantelope-size bulge that started right under my breasts and ended a little above my pubic bones.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

I’ve always been thin but never with a completely flat stomach. None of the women in my family had flat stomachs, especially as they age. I told him all about this.

“Yeah, right,” he laughed.

He sent me off to my gynecologist to check for ovarian cancer. When the tests were negative, he asked his partner, a gastroenterologists, to schedule an upper and lower endoscopy and run a bunch of tests. Nothing was out of the ordinary except for the colony of parasites living in my digestive track. They asked about my recent travels and I included a book research trip to a watermelon festival in rural Oklahoma. Did you know that rural parts of the Midwest are struggling with a third-world parasite? Neither did I.

The GI put me on antibiotics. My doctor insisted I begin to follow what he calls the “no eye-diet,” meaning cut out all animal-based foods and follow a strict vegetarian diet. Except potatoes. I could eat eye-dotted potatoes. He thought that was very funny.

You may rightly assume that the no-eye diet was a non-starter for a stubborn woman who believes that life isn’t worth living without meat, dairy products, and all manner of cakes and pies.

And, thus, I continued to contend with an aching stomach. Then last month, my husband started having the symptoms I have. We thought maybe it had something to do with years of consuming large cups of very strong coffee throughout the day. Maybe coffee had worn down his insides. He reluctantly reduced his coffee intake to two small cups a day but this didn’t help much. I introduced him to the medicine cabinet’s crowded stomach relief shelf. He was horrified at the prospect that this would be his life from now on.

A complaining spouse is usually a very good reason to take up a solitary hobby. I cleaned out the basement tool room and began to teach myself how to paint with watercolors. But I felt guilty, came upstairs and began to do the kind of research I guess I should have done many years before. It’s completely astonishing how much information there is about people having my exact same symptoms, almost all of them blamed on gluten.

It seemed to be a smart idea to begin buying every gluten-free product in every market within a five mile radius of home. Except for bread, spaghetti, and Oreo cookies, they weren’t bad, either. At least four days after changing our diet, my stomach bulge began to deflate and my husband felt a bit like himself again. I downloaded a chart with one side listing good foods in green and the other side bad food in red. It was okay that some of our favorite foods came up red. (Thank God, beer and wine were green.)

Would have no problem at all eating both by myself.

But it was not at all okay that bakery goods, especially cakes and pies, sat on the red side. Cakes and pies are as central to my mental health as any of my many prescribed pharmaceuticals are! It didn’t help that the instructions I read on how to create safe batters and crusts seemed as complicated as the chemistry experiments I was forced to do in high school chemisty, a subject I flunked twice.

This is the sad, panicky state of affairs ruling this corner of the universe. Am I really fated to never have a piece of cake and pie again?

Surely somebody out there can offer comfort and guidance. Anyone? Help!!