Last night’s dinner was a delicious. The fajitas were a hit. I did have to encourage my children to eat their vegetables. They are not a fan of onions. There is one in particular that is not a fan of bell peppers. Still I make them eat things from time to time that they are not a fan of.
To be fair, I did have other vegetables that they could loosely call vegetables. They could have a lot of salsa. They could have a lot of guacamole. On the other hand, is an avocado really a vegetable? I would not consider it a fruit, but by definition…
Anyway, dinner was a hit. I did eat the onions. I picked them out of the bell peppers. The onions were so fresh and yummy. They were delicious. The unfortunate thing is that I tend to belch them pretty quickly. I belch just about everything to be honest with you. It is normal for someone who suffers from severe reflux. GERD pretty much makes that a fore drawn conclusion that I am going to belch at least something from every meal. It is no fun, but something will always set me off. To my surprise, however, it was not that bad.
Of course, that was before the stuffy nose started. I thought that was strange. I was talking to my friend, Linn Macie, on the phone late last night and she asked me how I was feeling. I mentioned that I had a stuffy head. I mentioned that it was probably something I ate. Of course at the time, I did not put the symptoms together.
It is amazing how quickly we forget the symptoms for certain things. Maybe it is not that we forget or that we simply choose to ignore them when things are not so bad.
It was not until I went to bed. As I had been up since 2:00AM due to the insomnia issues I have been having on the antibiotic I am taking for the sinus infection I am battling, I was tired. I was flat out exhausted. I was heading to bed at 9:00PM or shortly there after. It was not until I went to bed and laid down that it hit me. Now keep in mind that I have not laid down flat in nearly two years. I sleep on a bed wedge and I have two pillows on top of that. So I did not even lay down flat. It was then that the pain began. It was not bad pain, it was just a dull ache in my stomach that was working slowly upward. Then the burn began.
That was enough to remind me just why I had the stuffy nose and head. It was not funny. I was experiencing silent reflux earlier with the stuffy head. Now it was not so silent. Fortunately, the burn was simply because the reflux was coming up higher than it had in a while and it was burning parts of my esophagus that it had not burned in a long time. The burn was not bad so much as it was just uncomfortable. Of course it just did not stop there.
This morning I woke up with flared asthma. My head only got stuffier. My eyes were gritty, burning, and covered with goop upon waking. The nasty eyes were a result of the height of reflux. The amount of mucous in my sinus cavities was a result of just how high I was refluxing. The asthma issues were a result of the irritation of my lungs. I managed to clear the goop from my eyes but I was still teary eyed because of the acid level coming from my tear ducts. It was burning my eyes and making me tear up. I had tears running down my face because of it. Really I was not crying, I was just miserable.
Fortunately, after being fully vertical for a few minutes and blowing my nose several times, I was able to get the eyes to stop watering and my head to clear up. The asthma calmed down quickly. I was feeling okay.
The unfortunate world of being a reflux sufferer was quickly thrust back on me last night. I was quickly reminded again why I do not eat certain foods. Oh how I had not missed that. Oh how I have not missed the misery and the pain.
The thing that I do not fully understand is that I had not completely cut onions from my diet up to this point. I had no idea. I am only at this point suspecting that it was the onions. It was the most likely offending agent of the items I ate last night. I knew that too many onions caused problems, but I do not eat them often nor do I eat them in large quantities. I did not really notice anything of this nature before. I was not focusing on removing them from my diet in full as I had managed to control the reflux to a modicum of comfort for now and the onions do not appear to trigger migraines in me like they do for my sister, Jennifer. After last night’s experience, however, I will probably be reconsidering that in the future. I certainly will not be consuming them in the amount that I did last night. Which I should add was not a lot to begin with.
So much for being able to enjoy a fresh food that looked divine. Pain is not worth the looks. Pain is not worth the taste. Onions and my palette will probably not cross too many more times. They certainly will not meet casually in mass. May the onions be happy with their other consumers.
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