What I Can Cook But Cannot Eat

08 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Work, Youth

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Cooking, Food, IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Life Changes, Omnivore, Remedies, Self-Reflection, Sleeplessness, Stress, Top Chef, Veganism, Work

Haagan-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Milkshake and My GI tract-if-I-drank-one-symbolism, June 8, 2022. (https://www.doordash.com & https://www.charlestonphysicians.com/gastroenterology/managing-ibs/). **Note: Sunday, August 31, 1997 at Union Station in DC was the last time I had one, and it delayed our bus trip back to Pittsburgh for more than two hours.**

My relationship with food has always been one of love, but with a heavy price. Off and on between October 1980 and May 1999, two things defined my time with food: the frequent lack of it, and my ability to cook and manipulate it. Besides having my mom as a guide, I think those 1,900 or so days with little to no food wherever I lived and whomever I lived with heavily influenced my cooking ambitions and chef-esque cooking skills.

While money has been tight at times in the years since, I have not personally confronted food insecurity or food access issues since the end of the twentieth century. Yet my ability to eat whatever I choose has declined from near-Hoover-vacuum levels of anything edible to a Matrix-level diet of rice krispies in water-infused electrolytes. My stomach has always been where stress and sickness decides to manifest. Even in my preteens, a milkshake at the wrong time or in combination with the wrong kind of food became a shitshake. I would sometimes be a few minutes late for class in graduate school (to the chagrin of my racist and ableist white professors) because of my GI (gastrointestinal) tract.

But there was nothing consistent about what I’ve known for more than 20 years to be my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) until the week after my PhD graduation in 1997. After a week of travel, job interviews, graduation, and personal betrayal, my body was burned out along with my mind and spirit. I had stomach pains for four days, and could barely eat. For more than a year afterward, the only dairy I could handle was Lactaid. Nearly anything, including spaghetti with red sauce, could set off a wave of diarrhea, or days of constipation.

Once we moved to the DMV, and especially once I took my assistant director job at New Voices, I finally had a regular doctor at GW Hospital in DC. After a sigmoidoscopy and a colonoscopy in 2001, my internist diagnosed me with IBS. There was a wrinkle, though. There was no physical evidence for why I had IBS. No signs of serious acid reflux, no tapeworms or other parasites, no ulcers or tears in the intestines or colon. “Are you saying that my irritable bowel syndrome is psychosomatic?,” I remember asking. The doctor said, “No. Whatever’s going on, we can’t explain it with the tests we have.”

Stress, work travel, and lack of sleep were constant companions in the ’00s for me. And that meant popping Imodium pills, the occasional acidophilus and other probiotics, and regulating parts of my diet. I did colon cleanses, fruit fasts, full fasting, and tried a shift toward vegetarianism. All results were middling at best.

It took leaving the nonprofit world and becoming a consultant with part-time professoring for my IBS to calm down in 2008 and 2009. Working mostly from home also allowed me more time to cook. Especially to cook meals I hadn’t cooked or eaten since I was a teen, or to cook entirely new dishes and desserts. I learned how to make traditional and Silician-style pizzas, French bread, madeleines, and rabbit ragù. I reverted and started making grits and biscuits, beans and rice, and corned beef from a can. I tried out stew peas with goat and beef, chicken tikka masala, and chicken marsala.

With all this, by 2013, I realized organic foods didn’t mess up my stomach nearly as much. And, that tons of probiotics and acidophilus (at least 7 billion CFU per meal or 30 billion for the whole day) kept me regular and regulated. I was in the best GI tract health of my adult life, and it stayed that way for a while. My flare-ups were maybe a few times a month, and not every day like they had been before. Yay, me!

That is, until the second half of 2019, the months going into the pandemic. With me teaching a 60-percent full-time schedule at each of two universities (for 120% FT equivalent) and drafting an article once every two weeks as a freelancer, even working from home became stressful. My IBS became worse, but selectively so. Eggs, brown, organic, free-range, whatever, became problematic. So did spaghetti, as well as hamburgers, anything with pinto beans, kidney beans, any food beyond the mildly spicy (and sometimes that would go through me, too). Snickers in the daytime was bad, but a bar right after dinner and under 75 degrees Fahrenheit was okay. Egg whites from Trader Joe’s led to a fart here or a burp there, but organic liquid egg whites from Whole Foods easily sparked a flare-up. Salads for lunch were now flat-out forbidden, but a tiny one with dinner was fine. Ice cream with a brownie, blondie, or cookies, dairy or dairy-free, was also okay. Most delivered or picked-up food has been an experiment in pain and gas.

This back-and-forth with IBS only got worse with the pandemic. Plus, I am over 50. Not everything I ate in my teens and in my 20s should be in my stomach and intestines now. Some would say I should go completely vegan (keep in mind, about a fifth of my diet is already vegan, and if one cooks for meat eaters, it’s hard for an omnivore to not taste). But after making stew peas last week, even four kidney beans was enough to make my stomach grumble, and vegan or not, all of us (and yours truly, too) need protein.

If my IBS is mostly a combination of environmental factors (e.g., stress internal and external, sleeplessness, travel, work intensity) and my psychological profile, then what do I do now? Go see a hypnotist? Move to another part of the world with millet, sorghum, sugar beets, and other things my stomach can digest? As it stands now, about half the meals I make these days are for my wife, my son, and sometimes my dog, but I can no longer eat or even taste without consequence. And that is more frustrating than the IBS.

A Diarrhea Football Sunday

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, Sports, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Come-From-Behind Victory, Coping Strategies, Diarrhea, East Rutherford New Jersey, Football, G/I Tract, Gastrointestinal Illness, Giants, Giants Stadium, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, NFL, Phil Simms, Pizza Shop, Pressures, Sicilian Pizza Pie, Stress, Stressors, Zeke Mowatt

Porthcawl, Wales takes a battering from a fierce Atlantic storm, February 5, 2014. (Getty Images, via http://www.express.co.uk).

I’m probably going to disgust a few of you who read this post. I promise I won’t go into a slurry of detail about this particular experience. It’s just that after years of gastrointestinal issues, I’ve learned a thing or two about triggers and coping strategies that may be helpful to folks.

Haagen-Dazs specialty milkshakes (my son had the $7 cookies and cream yesterday), November 23, 2014 (posted June 10, 2011). (http://www.qsrmagazine.com/).

This weekend thirty years ago, I learned for the first time that my body handled stress in a unique and painful way. I should’ve been aware of this much sooner than a month before my fifteenth birthday, and should’ve figured out how to counteract this long before my mid-thirties. I’d seen signs of it. The mugging I suffered from when I was nine in ’79. The recent broken toilet incident at 616. My inability to drink a chocolate milkshake from Carvel’s without the need to find a bathroom within forty-five minutes of my first sip.

But it wasn’t until the Sunday after Thanksgiving ’84, November 25th, that I recognized the link between the constant stress I felt and my G/I tract issues. It was a brisk late November day, like so many that time of year. The Giants were playing a big game in East Rutherford, against the Kansas City Chiefs. With a 7-5 record at the time, the Giants were fighting with both the Cowboys and Redskins for playoff position. They’d been on a roll of late, having won three of their previous four, including one on the road against Danny White’s Cowboys.

That’s what I thought about as the 1 pm game time approached. It wasn’t the only thing on my mind, though. It had been a long and stressful couple of months prior to this semi-break of a Thanksgiving weekend. This stretch included arguments with my Mom, including one in which I almost moved out. It included incidents with my teachers, especially Ms. Zini. It also included too many weekends of tracking down my father for money — including money that he owed us for working down in the city with him since the end of September. And washing clothes, and grocery shopping, and watching after Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri, and cleaning the apartment.

Somewhere in all of this, I must’ve picked up a stomach bug, from either my younger siblings or from something I ate. At least that’s what I thought at the time. The toilet became my constant companion throughout that afternoon, as a stepfather-free Sunday gave me and my older brother Darren the opportunity to watch the Giants game without interruption. That was, except from my stomach.

Flour water in a jar, November 23, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

I really didn’t know why I’d been on the toilet five times in two hours, but between that and Phil Simms’ lousy play in the first three quarters of the game (three interceptions, no touchdown passes), I felt really ill. My Mom suggested that I should drink flour water to settle my stomach. “Yuck” was the only thing I thought of her idea. The flour water thought had crossed my own mind, too though.

After Kansas City scored to take a 27-14 lead with a bit more than ten minutes left, I finally had an idea much more pleasant than flour water. I hadn’t eaten all day, and barely anything the night before. So I took five dollars of my Jimme money and went down the street to the local pizza shop. I order a slice of Sicilian with extra cheese. As thick as this shop made their Sicilians, I figured that would plug up my intestines.

While I waited for them to warm up my slice, I listened to the Giants game, which they had on their TV in the back of the shop. Simms had rallied the team and driven them down the field for a touchdown by the time I paid for my Sicilian slice. That actually lifted my spirits a bit.

I was hurting, so I didn’t wait. After I walked out of the shop, I took two big bites of my slice to see if it would help. By the time I made it to the front of 616, I let out a gigantic belch, and then my stomach, which had felt like a nor’easter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for hours, had finally calmed.

A good-looking Sicilian slice (my shop would’ve wrapped it in aluminum, though), November 23, 2014. (http://slice.seriouseats.com).

After I made it back upstairs to our place, the Giants had the ball again with less than three minutes in the game. They were driving on the Chiefs’ side of the field, in a two-minute drill. As I sat, ate and belched, Simms actually drove all the way down field for game-winning touchdown, a short pass to Zeke Mowatt. They won the game 28-27! I was stunned!

I learned a lot on that diarrhea football Sunday. For me, even watching a football game was stress-inducing. That sleeplessness and running myself down, the pressures of 616 and school, the pressure I put on myself, all manifested physiologically in my G/I tract. Sometimes escaping into comfort food, being pleasantly surprised by success, even someone’s else success, could calm my stomach. Sometimes not. Becoming fully aware of how my body responded to stress, though, would turn out to be a blessing, saving me from many moments of embarrassment over the years.

Facing The Tooth

14 Monday May 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Work, Youth

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6007 Penn Circle South, Advil, Carnegie Mellon University, Comps, Dentistry, Department of HIstory, Departmental Politics, Doctoral, Drug, East Liberty, History Department, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter, John Modell, Jr., Motrin, Naivete, PhD, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Root Canal, Stress, Toothache, unemployment, University of Pittsburgh, Written Comprehensives

My front teeth, including slightly darker lower tooth (right/my left), two root canals later, May 14, 2012, (Donald Earl Collins).

A funny series of events occurred on the transition from Pitt PhD student to Carnegie Mellon doctoral student in the spring and summer of ’93. Well, not really funny at the time. Nineteen years later, the months between April and October ’93 look like a semi-hilarious blip on my screen of life compared to what I’d gone through before and have faced since. But for a three-week period in April and May of that year, one of my teeth helped me both begin grad school at Carnegie Mellon and brought home the truth of my impoverished existence at the same time.

The week before the end of spring semester at the University of Pittsburgh — as well as the end of six years of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral work there — I woke up with a throbbing that went around the left side of my jaw. It radiated up through my left cheekbone, ear and temple. It was a toothache, one that I assumed was stress-related. Between the transfer to Carnegie Mellon, my efforts to move out of my crappy studio in East Liberty, and my search for summer work, I assume that it was just me grinding my teeth.

I relieved my stress and pain the way any normal twenty-three year-old male would. I took some Advil, went to sleep, hung out with friends and at hole-in-the-wall bars once the semester was over, and had myself a pretty good time. I took the approach that “everything will work itself out” to all the worries I had.

I also met with Carnegie Mellon’s History department’s graduate advisor that first week, John Modell (I learned later that he had been Joe Trotter’s dissertation advisor back in the mid-1970s). Modell cleared me to take the written part of the PhD comprehensive examination that the department’s second year students could take at the end of the year, which in ’93 was on May 14. Modell cleared me despite the fact that my first course as a Carnegie Mellon student wouldn’t begin until the end of August.

Then, after a week or so pain-free, I woke up a little after 5 am. I snapped up in my bed, knowing that

Severe premolar tooth decay (abscess), December 17, 2006. (Lycaon via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons 3.0 license.

something was wrong. Then, the pain came. It was like Mike Tyson had punched me in the left side of my jaw and I’d fallen head-first onto a boulder. The pain shot up and around like a puck in an NHL playoff game in overtime. The toothache was back, and it wasn’t going away.

Dumb-ass me, who rarely took meds for headaches, much less a rare toothache, tried to gut it out for a couple of days without much medicine at all. I went to Pitt that Monday and Tuesday to see if there was any chance to pick up a course to teach for the summer. There, I discovered how cold the History department administrators were regarding my time there. It turned out that there were two courses available. Even though I technically could’ve taught those courses, they held my transfer to the “other program” against me.

That made my pain worse. I couldn’t eat without a construction team of bacteria pounding my jaw. I couldn’t have a conversation without feeling brass knuckles punch my face in. I certainly couldn’t sleep more than four or five hours, and then only sitting up in a chair. By Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t think straight anymore.

I finally walked across the bridge on South Highland Avenue to a dentist’s office next to the local neighborhood laundromat, and after an hour, scheduled an appointment for 2 pm that Friday, and picked up a prescription for 800 mg Motrin pills. For someone as drug adverse as me, it might as well have been heroin. I was taking two at a time — the equivalent of eight Advil tablets — between Wednesday evening and Friday morning. In doing so, it became obvious that my lower left front tooth was the culprit, and that my dentist was correct. I needed a root canal procedure to drain the abscess.

Second floor of Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2, 2010. (Daderot via Wikimedia). In public domain.

So it was that on that fateful May 14, with three more horse-sized Motrin pills in my system, that I took my written comprehensives on the second floor of dark and factory-like (with its sloped floors) Baker Hall. I hadn’t studied at all, and all I really wanted to do was sleep. I chose two questions: one on women’s history/rights and historiography, the other on immigration history. From 9 am until about 12:30 pm, I wrote page after page on both subjects and conjured all the books and articles that I knew on both topics, which turned out to be quite considerable. I found the comps quite easy. Easier than any hoop that I had to jump through while at Pitt.

Still, I felt the throbbing of my tooth. Not the pain — the Motrin did its job — just the nerve in the tooth and the blood supply pushing pass the well of abscess in that tooth. I handed in my essays (I filled out four booklets’ worth of essays) and meandered my way to my dentist’s office. The root canal surgery took about two hours, but it only seemed like a dream, as I fell asleep off and on throughout.

I floated the two blocks home to 6007 Penn Circle South, secure in the fact that I passed my comps (as it turned out, with high distinction, although one of the examiners was puzzled by the fact that I had used sources not taught by any of the professors in the department). Just before I hit my pillow, ready to snore for the next fifteen hours, I thought, “Boy, is this going to be a long summer!”

Pressure

09 Friday Apr 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture

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Academia, College, Higher Education, Mental Health, Stress, Student Development, Teaching and Learning

Stanford University's Hoover Tower

This week, The Daily Beast posted their piece “The 50 Most Stressful Colleges” (see link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-04/the-50-most-stressful-colleges/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsC1). In the piece, the writer or writers emphasized five (5) criteria for college stressfulness: 1) cost; 2) competitiveness; 3) acceptance rate; 4) engineering; and 5) crime on campus rates. Sounds great right? Not if the writer or writers relied mostly on US News and World Report for most of their data in ranking what they believe are the Top 50. It seems to me that reporters with little background in higher education, the psychology of talented high school youth and college students, or financial aid should refrain from writing about such a topic. Still, since they did bring the subject up, it’s probably a good idea to address it from perspectives The Daily Beast would likely not consider.

For starters, the high correlation between their five criteria and the most prestigious research universities in the country — including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, University of North Carolina, and my doctoral alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University — seems okay on the surface of things. But really, are students at the University of Pittsburgh who are engineering majors less stressed out than English majors at Carnegie Mellon? Or could a student at a liberal arts school like Oberlin be experiencing higher levels of stress than a student at a school not on The Daily Beast’s list — say George Washington University?

Based on my own experiences as a professor and a student, yes, highly selective, research-oriented universities with competitive engineering programs can deliver stress to students on a platter. Yet, it’s not as if the other liberal arts colleges, state colleges and universities, and schools of similar elite ilk not on the list. The Daily Beast could’ve used pre-med and biology programs — such as those at Tufts and Johns Hopkins — as examples of competitiveness, as if engineering students are particularly prone to stress and suicide. I think, though, that this is the main point about The Daily Beast’s piece. It’s the taking of the recent news stories — students killing themselves or murdering students and faculty — and drawing the conclusion that it’s combination of the criteria that’s the difference here.

The piece discounts the experience of millions of college students under the stress of financial aid, whose programs, though not as prestigious, are likely as demanding, and with the pressure of high expectations from their schools and their families. It discounts students, quite frankly, and the baggage they bring with them when they enter college. The schools they list could cost $150,000 a year to attend, have acceptance rates or eight percent or less (I have no idea how Carnegie Mellon made their list with a thirty-seven percent acceptance rate), and pressure-cooker engineering programs, but the suicide rate and violent crime rate would likely not correlate at all. It’s all about how students handle pressure, and how schools help students with managing the pressures they experience at competitive and selective colleges and universities.

I should know. Halfway through my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh, I experienced stress because of the baggage I brought from my Mount Vernon High School days, specifically in the form of a young woman I wanted to date but couldn’t. I spent the last six weeks of that semester missing more than sixty percent of my classes, withdrew into a alcohol-binge one weekend, and generally didn’t seek any social outlets for my emotional and psychological pain. Because I knew that there was a stigma attached to seeking psychological help, I didn’t, and struggled my way through the end of ’87 and into the first days of ’88 wondering if the sacrifices I made to get into college in the first place were actually worth it.

I think that student mental health is a much neglected aspect of pre-K to graduate education. Period. We act as if students and parents are solely responsible for the maintaining of student mental health, when in point of fact, most students and parents see the exploration of the subject as a stigma of some sort. Of course they are wrong. Still, I think that every school and every school district in this country should have at least one psychologist on staff (age-appropriate, of course), and that every student be given a mental health evaluation at least once a year.

Going a step further, I think that mental health fitness should be a part of the college admissions process, and that students who have the academic abilities but show signs of mental health issues be given additional resources to deal with these issues before the stress of higher education has had a chance to effect their undergraduate journey. I also don’t think it would hurt to make faculty, staff and administrators at universities to take professional development seminars in student psychology, so that they themselves can understand the difference between normal and abnormal behaviors of their students.

Some of you will think this idea beyond crazy. After all, those who can’t cut it are losers, right? And, since when can a university look at the mental health fitness of applicants, anyway? How many parts of doctor-patient privilege don’t I understand? I never said that this would be a perfect solution. This would provoke a number of controversies and lend itself to multiple obstacles. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be good for students and parents to have a sense of the kinds of stresses that can affect the well-being — academic and otherwise — of someone before they went off to a college or university?

Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all on this matter is the issue of competition. There’s nothing wrong with having students in a competitive environment. It often brings out the best in them academically (and the worst, unfortunately, hence my comments in the previous two paragraphs). Suffering setbacks in the process of competition can even teach us more about ourselves and the world around us than constant success. That’s what folks say, at least. So students shouldn’t be afraid to compete. But college campuses — and public schools also — should wrap this competition in a velvet cocoon of excellence. Meaning that from an early age, students are encouraged to strive for and achieve excellence, academically, socially, athletically, and so on. Along the way, healthy competition should be inculcated, but within the context of students performing well to begin with.

All so that by the time students arrive on a college campus, the stress of competition is managed through an atmosphere that is all about excellence. This is not a zero-sum game where the winner takes all and the loser should think about becoming a janitor. These are human beings, after all, whose lives should be about more than A’s, and competition about more than destroying their opponents. It took me until my third semester at Pitt to learn that lesson, which made my transition to a healthier mental health easier.