Friday 17 February 2006

Pic of the day: The joy of lunch ... unless you overdo it, of course.

Stupid stomach

After a light breakfast, I ate a slightly late lunch, with three slices of rye bread covered by heavily processed muscle tissue from domestic animals, low-fat sausage. (9% fat, not bad!) I also ate a small piece of dark chocolate, as is good and proper. After this I was almost full. A couple hours later I decided to top it with a few spoons of yogurt, so I fetched a half-liter box from the fridge. (A liter is about a quarter of a gallon, as you may remember. This was half that.) Well, something happened to distract my higher brain functions, and suddenly I had eaten most of the yogurt. Perhaps two cups. This was more than planned, and it did not go down well.

My stomach felt distinctly overloaded. It was quite uncomfortable and distracting. Also over time stomach acid made itself increasingly felt, and there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I cannot throw up on command, like most people can by putting a finger in their throat. I have to be very, very sick to throw up, though it is known to happen a few times in my adult life. I would have been happy if this had been one of them, but this did not happen. When I came home, I took a acid- neutralizing tablet, which I guess did what was advertised. My stomach still hurt, though, and felt distended or out of its natural shape.

This was between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. It is now well over 9, and only now am I starting to feel hungry again. That does not mean the stomach has stopped hurting, though. It still hurts, but it is now also increasingly hungry. (Walks off to eat a teaspoon of honey.)

My best guess is that the overload filled up a part at the top of the stomach that is not normally used, and exposed it to stomach acid, which it was not accustomed to or made for. I assume it will remain irritated for a while, but hopefully it will heal by itself, like most body parts do as long as they survive. I will decidedly not repeat this for a while. Actually it is not the first time I have that sensation, although it is one of the worst. I had a similar episode a few months ago, I don't remember now if it was in fall or early winter, but it was just after my digestion had started to be able to handle larger amounts of food. I overshot and hurt it, but it healed then. I had similar feelings after the last McDonalds meals I had where I also included a milkshake, a few years ago. (That's why I stopped, obviously.) A very strange feeling, as if the stomach is distended out of shape by a balloon or something such inside it. That's just what it feels like, of course. There isn't actually any such thing there.

And all this could have been avoided if I had remained more conscious while eating. My instincts still believe that there is a famine, and if I let them alone for half a minute, they are perfectly willing to risk my health if not my very life in an attempt to stuff as much food into my gaping maw as physically possible. The idiots. Or is that just me?

***

In utterly unrelated news, I am trying to get my home network up and running so I can make Sims stories to share with my online friends. I run the Sims on a different machine, my newest, the gaming machine that used to be in my bedroom. The strange thing is that while I can get up shared folders from my Internet machine on the game machine, I can not get up the shared folders on my Internet machine, which is where I do my writing. Before, when this worked, I could take a picture in Sims2 and immediately include it in my story which I wrote on the other machine. I have no idea why it doesn't work any longer. It stopped after I lost the Internet connection, but these are all local folders.

Perhaps I really am stupid now. They say you are the last to notice your own senile dementia.