Scale Back

What my doctor didn’t know was that I have a very close friend who had been dealing with the effects of chronic Hepatitis C for several years. Over the course of those years my friend had told me about his various struggles with the disease. For example, once, as he was driving from Tennessee to Ohio, he became extremely nauseated. The nausea was so intense that it forced him to pull off the highway and park on the shoulder of the road. He stumbled out of the car and made his way to a nearby tree. He held onto that tree for several hours so as to steady himself while he vomited repeatedly. Between vomiting, passing out and resting, a scenario that was repeated over and over again, he was there from dusk until dawn.
I also learned from my friend that the pharmacological agents used to treat Hepatitis C only had a success rate of approximately 50% at best. Worse yet, the two medications used in combination as a cure for this dreaded disease are known to have extremely negative side effects; one of them being depression. The mood swings caused by the onset of the depression had lead to documented instances of suicidal tendencies. I walked out of the physician’s office thinking to myself, “I am going to become gravely ill, I have less than a fifty-fifty chance of a successful cure rate, a transplanted liver will just become infected with the disease again and I may commit suicide!” The diagnosis dealt an emotional blow, but prognosis frightened me. I began to seek solace in comfort foods. Regardless of what causes it, or what you choose to call it, unhappiness is the root cause of all overeating.

# posted by David @ 11:31 PM