Heart Burn

I remember the first time it happened. I felt this burning rise up to my throat, constrict my chest, restrict my breathing. I was only a young teenager and I panicked, started breathing rapidly, convinced I couldn’t actually catch my breath. What was attacking me?

My sweet mother must have been torn about how to respond. This was her daughter with a multitude of stomach-related ailments, a discontented bladder, who would become suddenly ill and need a rest stop now. But she was no stranger to ailments that didn’t always make sense and, worried, she drove me to the walk-in clinic. And she did this more than once.

I would sit in the waiting room, breathing desperately, rapidly, feeling the panic swell up inside me. The rising burning from my belly to my throat felt like a physical manifestation of my fear. By the time an actual doctor came to examine me, I’d have the breathing under control and feel humiliated by my lack of symptoms. The doctor would seem surprised, then relieved. Despite the overwhelming pain, loss of breath, inability to lie down, this was just heartburn.

This came to mind last night as I sat up in an ottoman during the wee hours of the morning, desperate for sleep, but paralyzed into a sitting position once again by insidious heartburn. I probably could have slept through the night, unaware of the heartburn rising up, if my 4 year-old had not literally frightened me from sleep as she screamed “Mommy, Mommy!” desperately from her bed. She suffered only from waking in the dark, her precious night light removed to accommodate her brother now sleeping in the bunk below. But I was now trapped, awake, suffering.

I can connect this current, unexpected, night time heartburn and indigestion, thankfully, to pregnancy. I’m now in my 6th month of my 3rd pregnancy. This is all an unfortunate part of the drill. It is also the worst, most horrific heartburn/indigestion I have ever experienced. Hands down. But sitting with only my thoughts and the final Harry Potter for company last night, I knew this pain could be treated by time, rest, and antacids.

The same could not be said for the younger me. My mom, wise woman that she is, understood long before I did that the physical ailments I suffered – the Irritable Bowel Syndrome, stomach pains, food aversions, and more – were very real outward manifestations of internal pain. She supported me, comforted me, never pushed or humiliated me.

She endured tests and treatments, diets and doctors with me, waiting until I was ready to acknowledge the grief, the sorrow, the fear; the myriad of emotions pushed down inside of me. When my stomach was no longer the center for my emotions, without inner turmoil constantly gurgling inside it, when I learned not to anguish over food decisions and fear their consequences, I stopped creating the very ailments I feared.

When my overwhelming fears and emtions no longer ruled and controlled me, only then could heart burn be just heartburn.