Modern Medicine - I Am A Fan

I went two weeks ago to have an endoscopy done. Some time in my 30s, I started living with a bottle of tums beside my bed. And one in my purse. It became so normal that it didn't occur to me to mention it to a doctor for years. When I finally did, he gave me the heads up that THIS WAS NOT NORMAL.
Since then, it's probably been 12 or more years of a dance of increasing/changing my medicine to try to halt the burning death that was occurring inside my stomach.
Nothing ever really completely fixed me.
I took stuff that helped, but even on a lot of medicine, every day about 4 or 5 my internal furnace would kick up and my stomach would start eating itself.
After I had my gallbladder out though, I ended up back in the hospital a year later in stomach agony and they got me referred to a specialist at tummy stuff. I put her off for oh...8 months or so but finally on the 9th we went over and I had the procedure.
The place where we did it was a special center that simply does tubes up the bum or down the throat depending on the day of the week, and truly it was easy peasy. It was a very nice place, and they put me completely to sleep.
A brief aside, a friend of mine in Italy had this procedure done last year. He described the horror show of how you can't really breathe or talk and you're choking and gagging and it feels like you're going to die, and then says "But don't worry. They tie you down."
NOTE TO AMERICANS - DO NOT HAVE THIS PROCEDURE DONE IN ITALY.

Anyway, they found I have a hiatal hernia and severe inflammation. No infection or anything so yay. But they put me on a drug that she warned me my insurance might not cover because it's the bad ass of stomach medicine and we know insurance companies never want to cover the drugs you ACTUALLY need.

But miracle they covered it and for the first time in years, my stomach never hurts now.

It's sort of amazing the husband and I even had drinks Saturday night and I didn't aspirate the booze into my lungs in the middle of the night, and I didn't wake up with burning death all might so, I think we might've found the cure.

It's such a little thing, but you learn to live with little miseries until they become a way of life. I've got to stop doing that.
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