My 50-Year Medical Mystery Was a Fucking Milk Fart.

   

Alright. Let's talk about the miracle of modern medicine. A truly inspiring story of fifty years of brilliant, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art fucking guesswork. For half a century, my body was a crime scene, and the detectives were all Inspector Clouseau.

    They had a long list of suspects, a whole rogues' gallery of ailments. They called it a "nervous stomach." They called it "Bipolar-Lite™." They called it "bad luck." They called it "getting older." For fifty years, a long line of well-dressed, over-confident, six-figure-income witch doctors looked at a simple case of the fucking milk farts and saw a grand, baffling mystery.

    And the whole time, the real culprit wasn't hiding. It was sitting right in the middle of the table, smiling, waving a flag, and pretending to be my best friend. It was the milk. It was the cheese, it was the yogurt, it was the butter, it was the whey, it was every goddamn creamy, dreamy, milky-white assassin I ever let past my lips. I didn't have a hundred different problems. I had one problem, being systematically poisoned by a government-approved food group. I was living through the Dairy Holocaust, and nobody even knew the war had started.

    The first casualty was the tonsils. Five years old. Throat feels like I swallowed a handful of lit matches. The diagnosis? "Kids get sick." The solution? "Take 'em out!" Of course! The fire alarm is screaming, so you rip the alarm off the wall instead of looking for the fucking fire! In hindsight, it was a gut in a state of permanent, frothing rage, sending waves of acid north to see what it could dissolve. But they didn't call it acid reflux. They called it "Tuesday."

    Then came the twenties. My asshole declared independence. We'll call it Spontaneous Asshole Disassembly. The doctor, a man of profound insight, told me the problem was my chair. My *chair*. "You're sitting too much." Thank you, Dr. Edison! It couldn't be the decades of Chronic Intestinal Insurrection finally blowing out the southern wall, could it? No, it's a furniture problem. Maybe I should try shitting standing up?

    And the head-shrinkers! My God, the head-shrinkers. They saw the mood swings, the fatigue, the depression, and they loved it. It was a new customer! They slapped on the designer label—Bipolar-Lite™—and handed me a prescription. It never occurred to theseEinsteins that my brain was running on empty because my gut was so busy fighting a two-front war against a cheese omelet it had no time to absorb a single fucking vitamin. I wasn't mentally ill; I was a well-fed case of malnutrition.

    Then, the grand finale. The night the universe finally got tired of dropping hints and decided to hit me with a fucking brick. I'm fifty. I have a nice meal. Something with a rich, creamy, fresh cheese sauce. It was a velvet glove wrapped around a razor blade.

    I go home. And for the next eight hours, my insides re-enacted the battle of Stalingrad. I'm on the toilet, convinced I'm giving birth to a full-grown wolverine, and I do the only logical thing: I start calling the other dinner guests to see if I can get a few co-conspirators for my food-poisoning theory.

    And one by one, the reports come back. Cheerful. Happy. Healthy. "No, George, everybody's fine." Out of fifty people, I was the only one whose body was trying to achieve nuclear fusion in his lower intestine.

    And as I'm sitting there, sweating, cramping, and contemplating the sweet release of a massive coronary, the light bulb finally goes on. A dim, flickering, 40-watt bulb, but it was enough. And it illuminated a single, terrifying thought: "The... cheese."

    And fifty years of bullshit snapped into focus. The tonsils. The asshole. The teeth turning to dust. The "bipolar" brain. It wasn't random. It wasn't bad luck. It was a conspiracy. A perfectly executed, fifty-year campaign of biological terrorism, and the mastermind... was a fucking cow.

    And the genius of the scam is that it wasn't an everyday assault. The attacks were sporadic. A pizza here, a bowl of ice cream there. Just enough to keep me and the medical geniuses looking in all the wrong directions. Just enough to let them keep writing prescriptions and blaming my chair.

    Fifty years. Fifty years of "experts," fifty years of "science," fifty years of "progress"... to solve a case of the fucking milk farts.

    Makes you feel real confident in the guys running the show, doesn't it?