My Liver Cancer Blog

Having gastritis has been annoying (but boy would I like to go back to when that was my only problem, and have that truly be my only problem!). I’ve had to give up a lot of foods I like to eat: no acidic foods (so no tomatoes or tomato-based sauces; no citrus fruits or other acidic fruits like peaches or berries), no alcohol, no coffee, no carbonated drinks, no spicy foods. And, it turns out that high-fiber foods, like chickpeas, lentils, black beans, whole oats, brown rice, are hard for me to digest without lots of discomfort (and I really love black bean soup or a spicy chickpea curry or overnight oats). I’ve been on gastritis Reddit discussion boards, so I know that a lot of people have it far worse than I do, but giving up foods in order to reduce the inflammation in my stomach lining has been a little tough. And, at the same time, I was sticking to a very low-fat diet in order to help reduce inflammation in my gallbladder (goodbye cheese, red meat, fatty fishes, ice cream). Later my oncologist said I didn’t have to be so strict about the low-fat diet, so I’ve re-introduced some of those foods in a careful way.

But I’ve started thinking about my gastritis differently because it was the gastritis that brought me to the doctor in the first place. Remember Horton Hears a Who – the Dr. Seuss book about Horton, the elephant, who can hear voices coming from a tiny speck of dust floating through the air, but cannot see the people speaking? But he knows people are there, and he does everything he can to protect them, despite being abused by the other jungle animals who want to “boil that dust speck, boil that dust speck!” The moment I remember best from that book is when all the Whos in Whoville join together to yell, “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here!” And it works – the other jungle animals can finally hear the Whos, and the dust speck is saved.

So that’s how I’ve started thinking about my gastritis. Maybe my liver tried to get my attention before (“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here – please help me”), but it just wasn’t noticeable to me as a symptom. And so my stomach started crying out, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here! There’s something wrong with the liver, there’s something wrong with the liver!” And I paid attention to those symptoms, and ultimately got diagnosed. Without the gastritis I might still be living my life with the tumour getting bigger and bigger, and it might not have been diagnosed until I had major liver dysfunction, yellow skin, yellow eyes, and so on. So I think of my stomach, gallbladder, and liver crying out together like the Whos in Whoville, “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here!”