The Other Me
‘Looking For Answers’ ii. The fructose test involved breathing into a meter which measured the level of fructose in my stomach, drinking a glass of fructose, and then breathing into the meter every half hour for the next three hours to see how my stomach reacted. If, at any point, the reading was over that initial base reading by a factor of twenty, it meant my stomach wasn’t absorbing the fructose, and thus I must be fructose intolerant. I brought my laptop to the little clinic where the test was performed, breathed into the meter, and got an initial reading of 4. I then downed the glass of fructose, a…
The Other Me
‘Looking For Answers’ i. One evening, I was watching TV when my sinuses spasmed, then closed-up. It became almost impossible to breathe through my nose – possibly hayfever. Dr Warren tried various medications: sprays, which did nothing; and an antihistamine, which simply made me insatiably thirsty. Hayfever had begun to affect me the previous year, the year of Black Saturday, when horrific bushfires had razed Kinglake. I wondered if the loss of trees, or all the soot in the air, were perhaps somehow the cause, as I knew others who’d never had issues with hayfever but had now begun to suffer from it. Sometimes, I also began to feel a…