My Stomach Has a Memory

I'm sick. Again. Except this time it's my stomach, or some part of my digestive system. Anyhoo, the plumbing is messed up. This is never, ever a good thing. You see, my stomach has a memory and it's very, very good.

Any food I've ever eaten and later become sick from my stomach remembers all too well. One might say it holds a grudge. There was the cinnamon roll incident of '98, the Cafe Rio bust of '03, and it seems we're looking at the Subway/Pepsi explosion of '11.

My mother makes the most amazing cinnamon rolls. When I got sick I hadn't even eaten one of her's, it was somewhere else. But because the last thing I ate before I became ill was that cinnamon roll it was years before I could eat one. Now I can have the small one with only a dab of frosting.

Cafe Rio was a whole different story. I had moved out, it was my freshman year of college, and I went to Provo to visit a friend. Since moving out my diet had vastly improved (instead gaining the freshman 15, I lost it), and my stomach had shrunk considerably--not something I took note of at the time. So my friend and I went to Cafe Rio and I ordered what I always ordered, but I had to eat quickly because she was under time constraints, so I inhaled the burrito and drove home to Ephraim. Eight hours later that burrito resurfaced. I might suggest never finding a cilantro leaf in your tissue after blowing your nose...it's not pretty. It took almost a year before I could even set foot into another Cafe Rio. Then, when my mother squeezed lime onto her salad I started gagging, and had to go to the car and wait until they were done eating. Curious that of everything I ate in that burrito the aversion is the lime in the cilantro lime rice. Now I just ask for no rice, and am fine. But it's taken years to get to that place.

Which brings us to present day. I don't know what made me sick. I still don't know why I'm sick. But sick I am. Oooo-eeee! And since the last thing I ate was a Subway Oven Roasted Chicken sandwich on flat bread...guess who won't be frequenting that establishment for a while. Too bad, too, because I just earned a free foot long. The Pepsi comes into play as part of the treatment. Although it may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, drinking carbonated beverages actually helps settle the stomach. As a child my mother always bought me Sprite. Now I can't drink the stuff without going a little green around the gills and starting to feel queasy. Well, we had Pepsi on hand so that's what I've been drinking. And now, because I am sick, my stomach will associate Pepsi with this illness, and I fear I will no longer like my favorite soft drink.

I suppose it's all for the best. Afterall, I'm trying to lose weight, so why not knock off a few of the bad-for-me things? Yeah, that's what I'll do, use my stomach's magical memory to my advantage.