jennfrank.

spontaneous resolution

red carnelian

A few days ago, I took a Lyft with a driver named Armando. To my surprise he asked me, unprompted, if I ever read my horoscope. I eyed the rosary hanging from his rearview mirror before admitting that my astrology app was open on the phone in my hand, and that I’d actually been reading my horoscope before we’d started talking. But it wasn’t always my bag, I said, and I have only the barest, most rudimentary understanding of natal charts. Then he asked me if I’d ever had my Tarot read, and I again eyed the rosary before admitting that yes, I had, and that I’d studied Tarot for over 20 years—although I’d briefly given it up. (“I don’t believe in fortune-telling and, anyway, if you try to ask it what you should do, it won’t tell you,” I said. “That's true!” Armando said to me.)

Lyft drivers have asked me the wildest things; sometimes it feels like a sort of checkpoint where the Universe is asking me to codify my beliefs and then stand by them, articulating them to a random stranger for no reason but to prove I can. I used to shift uncomfortably and prevaricate, but now I think to myself oh, we're doing this and just answer the fucking questions.

For instance, just now, my friend asked me why I’m drinking “coffee alternative”—hot mushroom powder—instead of coffee? I admitted it’s because of Joaquin (I am still calling the DoorDasher by name). Joaquin chose to give me this in lieu of the coffee I’d requested. Joaquin had also picked a better sourdough crouton for my Caesar salad than the one I did in fact choose. “One time,” I explained, “I’d asked a DoorDasher for a specific toothpaste, but they brought me hydroxyapatite toothpaste instead. Then I read about hydroxyapatite, and I realized it was probably healthier. It seemed like a sign. I’m getting older and should be making healthier decisions, so I decided to switch to hydroxyapatite toothpaste altogether.”

“That’s probably a very healthy way of looking at things,” my friend said thoughtfully. A few days earlier I’d admitted to this friend that I accept the way DoorDash is much more loosey-goosey than Instacart or Uber Eats—that you’re liable to just end up with whatever a stranger picks out for you, and that’s the cost of someone else shopping. It’s only galling if the substituted item doesn’t make any sense at all.

“Also,” my friend said, still thoughtful, “at this stage you’re set in your ways, and you might not try new things otherwise.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So I am drinking the coffee alternative.”

Back to Armando: He’d asked about astrology and then Tarot, and then he suddenly said, “What is your opinion on, uh, rocks?”

I started laughing, because I could not handle this. OK: before I’d gotten into astrology or anything like that, I’d purchased a crystal—a carnelian, actually. By then I’d been sick with gastrointestinal problems for a few years, and doctors didn’t seem to want to investigate. I became so desperate, I bought a tumbled carnelian and “I just held it to my stomach. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

A few years after that, I was diagnosed with gastroparesis, a functional motility disease. “Doctors helped,” I told Armando, “kind of. But we were reaching the far edge of what modern medicine can do to help.”

Recently, however, my symptoms abated: a spontaneous resolution.

“In the end, what helped wasn’t crystals, and it wasn’t doctors,” I told Armando. “Sometimes we don’t want to look directly at what is really troubling us.”

Last month I stayed in an Airbnb rental that had been misrepresented by its owner. For one thing, the rental was at an entirely different address. The floors were sticky, and there was dirt on the walls. It was a sort of carriage house, or shed, sitting behind a larger, abandoned house that, according to Google Maps, was a pest control business. The pest control business had 1 star on Google. When I sat on the bed, it collapsed.

I was nervous about staying there, but I was also desperate. Then a mourning dove sitting near the steps of the abandoned house cooed at me. Would a mourning dove coo if everything weren’t all right? So I started unpacking.

I teasingly referred to this carriage house as a “murder shack” a few times, but then I stopped calling it that, because I feared the moniker would somehow become self-fulfilling. Besides, there were a couple things that were okay or even pleasant about the shack, such as: running water. The mini fridge worked, and the single other kitchen appliance—a two-burner hot plate—was perfectly handy. I filled the mini fridge with stacks of yogurt cups.

At this point I began referring to the Airbnb as the “poop shack.” I texted my best friend to say she was not fully appreciating “the degree of gastrointestinal rebirth happening in here.”

I would go on to speculate that affording time to myself spent alone—just one full day a week—plus a steady diet of yogurt and bananas, would keep my digestive process whirring along. (“I made fun of her,” I lamented, “but Jamie Lee Curtis was right.”)

During that trip, I noticed I ate cabbage without dying.

Two weeks ago, I apprehensively ordered a Caesar salad. I fucking love a Caesar salad; it was my first salad in eight years.

Caesar salad

At the dinner party, my Caesar salad was a hit. I explained to the group that, until recently, I hadn’t been able to enjoy one.

“I don’t know if anyone is familiar with Human Design—“ I started.

Three young women cheered for Human Design. I looked around the table in wonderment. They laughed at the look on my face. “You’re in the right place!” one young woman said. Surely this is an L.A. thing.

I explained that my chart had said I was low digestion, which means that I need a lot of environmental calm in order to process my experiences. In chaotic environments, I lose this ability. By slowing down, I’d recovered my ability to rest and digest—as in, actually digest.

My dietitian hadn’t been surprised; she sees this type of thing all the time.

“The metaphor becomes literal!” I’d said to my dietitian excitedly, after having fully digested my first Caesar salad.

“Meta… physical,” my dietitian had suggested.

“Oh, my God,” I’d said. “That is what that word means, isn’t it! The metaphor is physical.” I shook my head.

“Anyway,” I concluded, looking around the table at the dinner party, “this Caesar salad is my gift to you.”

I told my breakfast partner this morning about gastroparesis. “It means I can’t digest,” I began, and then I proceeded to jokingly list everything on the bagels between us.

I’d been in severe pain for years. Every doctor I’d ever spoken to had told me the same thing: “Gastroparesis isn’t supposed to hurt like that.” Well, they were wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time in gastroparesis support groups; it very often does hurt like that. So each time someone said this to me, I’d get sadder and sadder, because yet another doctor was proudly displaying a lack of insight into this semi-rare motility disease.

Gastroparesis patients are also often subjected to “pointless” gallbladder removal. If you search online (right before your surgery, for instance) for any evidence of gallbladder removal helping with gastroparesis, you will find nothing. Removal typically worsens gastroparesis, in fact! Sometimes it is the precipitating event itself! So when my latest gastroenterologist pushed for cholecystectomy, I pushed back. I said no, never. I said I’d consider it. I said he was the only person who could get me to consider it.

Eventually, though, I would find myself in profound, acute pain—the kind of excruciating pain that takes away any apprehension—so by then I was down for anything. My gallbladder was removed. Then, horror settled upon me: maybe gastroparesis isn’t supposed to hurt like that.

I explained to my breakfast partner that I’ve been considering saying something about this online—that cholecystectomy has inexplicably helped at least one gastroparesis patient, who is me—just so there is any documentation of cholecystectomy ever benefiting anyone with a paralyzed gastrointestinal tract. Still, I think such a statement would be extremely unpopular in every possible circle. Like, there is no record in the existing medical literature of gallbladder removal helping anyone who already has gastroparesis.

A few nights ago I tried to search the Internet for “spontaneous resolution of idiopathic gastroparesis symptoms.” Apparently, it does occasionally happen!… in newborns.

I have theories. Unfortunately, the narratively convenient thing about my gastroparesis is that it is idiopathic. Without a clear cause, we can never say for sure what really resolved its symptoms.