My Stomach Exploded and I Couldn’t Eat or Drink for Six Years

IT HAPPENED TO ME: My Stomach Exploded and I Couldn’t Eat or Drink for Six Years

I wanted spiritual fulfillment, to find God again, but I'd give him up in a heartbeat for a hunk of steak.

When I was 18 years old, I was your typical well-fed Jewish girl, partial to Chinese food and non-alcoholic Shirley Temples. It was the night of our family Passover seder — a favorite holiday of mine. As always, there were 30 joyous and over-stuffed friends and family surrounding us; we told the Passover story with our mouths full of laughter, song, brisket and kugel; I felt snuggly embraced by the love and warmth of the people in my life and the safety of a time-honored family tradition. 

And then I felt something that I had never experienced before.

It felt like a very simple, harmless stomach ache, perhaps from too much matzoh. Nowhere in my teenage view could I ever had anticipated a coma right before my senior prom, and months later, being awoken by doctors who solemnly shook their heads and shrugged as they said, "You can't eat or drink right now. And we don't know when or if you'll ever be able to again."

But that's what happened. The night of Passover, in 2005, my stomach literally burst to the top of the operating room from so much pressure building up inside my abdomen. I had barely survived a horrific episode of sepsis, organ failure, and mesenteric artery thrombosis resulting in "ischemic necrosis of the stomach and large and small intestine."

While I lay in a coma for months, I owed my life to intravenous nutrition: IV fluids that injected nutrition directly into my bloodstream. With an empty abdominal cavity, any fluid or food that I ingested had the potential to kill me on the spot. For the six years I was unable to eat a morsel of food or drink a drop of liquid, IV nutrition kept me alive. But psychologically, I was constantly starving.

Apparently, you don't need a stomach to survive. Intravenous fluids were enough to give me the energy of a racehorse. My days were filled with karate, weight-lifting, tap-dancing — all to get my mind off of what I really wanted the most: to feed my hunger.

Imagine waking up from a very sedated sleep, months after what felt like an innocuous stomach ache, and learning I wasn't going back to high school, or going to any of the colleges I had "just" been accepted to. Or, I'd never be seeing my old house again — my family moved us to a brand new town the day I was discharged from the hospital. I learned that while I was in a coma, my childhood dog had developed a tumor, and that both of my grandparents had died.

And then, once doctors felt I was "ready" to hear about my real situation, I was completely floored. I was told about changes that were out of my control and the circumstances that I had to accept. Now that I had no stomach, doctors couldn't predict when or if I'd ever be able to eat again. Suddenly, water and ice cubes were a forbidden pleasure that I'd taken for granted all of my life. Now, the sound of water running at a nearby sink was torture to me — another reminder of things I couldn't do.

The more alert I became, the more I remembered of my old life PC — pre-coma. Things like water. I missed water so much — drinking it, touching it, or even playing with it. The first time they let me splash water on my face, I cried. It reminded me of washing my face in my old bathroom, in my old body, and I didn't know if it would never feel the same way again. In the hospital, the highlight of my day was finally being allowed to brush my teeth, just for that soothing gargle of ice-cold water that would kill me if I ever dared swallow it. 

Those basic human needs I couldn't fulfill reminded me of other primal needs I couldn't fulfill, like being outside, feeling the cool air on my skin, or casually taking a sip from a water fountain.

Art I made of my ideal meal when I was dreaming of feeding my hunger.