My GERD Beginnings

After living with GERD, I have taken a long look back at my life and my relationship with food.  I now realize that I've had a bit of a love/hate relationship with eating.

I love food.  I love eating food.  I've never been much for cooking, but I'm the first one knocking on my friends' door to see what they have on the stove.  I always say yes to dinner outings, and I rarely turned down a pizza after a night of drinking.  Please note that I'm from New York City.  One thing we have is restaurants and cuisine from every corner of the world, so over eating super wonderful food is quite easy.

This was exactly what happened when I had my first "GERD attack."  I call it this because before that, though I may have had GERD symptoms, I never truly thought there was something wrong:

I drove my family to the mall and ran some other errands.  I think I had maybe breakfast.  I got to my mother's house and she said she would make food.  This was around 9 pm.  I said no, I wanted to go home.  I drove myself home, but before that I stopped at Popeyes.  I'm a big Popeyes fan, never cared for KFC.  I bought a couple of chicken pieces, two servings of large cajun fries, a rootbeer (though I'm really not a soda drinker), and a couple of M&Ms almonds from the 711 next door because I love those and rarely saw them.  I went home, ate it all, and about an hour later I found myself bloated like I had never been.  I thought it would go away so didn't pay it any mind.  2 Hours later: my belly had grown more and I was shocked at how much it hurt.  4 hours later, my belly had not come down.  I read something online about walking to relieve bloating.  I walked for like 30 minutes.  I came back and I was still bloated.  I was a little scared, particularly because I couldn't lay down at all.  My breathing was shallow. I considered paramedics but knew this had to get better.  I sat on my couch and stayed there, barely sleeping.  The next day I was better but constipated, which is quite unusual for me.  I spent the next 4 days eating tons of fiber, but nothing helped me go.  I finally took a couple of different laxatives and that helped.  I could barely eat though, and felt weak.  On the 7th day (New Year's Eve by the way), I went to my family's for dinner and after a few bites of food was dizzy, had hot flashes, and my stomach got so big that my family rushed me to the hospital.