On one of the occasions when I called the gastroenterologists to complain that my heartburn wasn’t getting any better (there were a couple of rounds of such calls, before I went back to my regular doctor), the woman I spoke to asked “Are you experiencing stress at work?”
“Yes,” I said, “and before you say anything else, there’s nothing I can do about that.” Which is absolutely true– if stress is the real cause, then I’m stuck with this until at least December (which is about the earliest my tenure decision could come through).
College teaching is an extremely stressful job, as this Inside Higher Ed piece details. That’s talking specifically about the lot of a faculty member in English, but it’s not that different in the sciences. We just replace the grading of papers with a mix of shorter work (problem sets, quizzes) and extended class prep (setting up demonstrations and labs). And, as previously noted, research activity is more tied to work.
Would my stomach problem benefit from a decrease in the ambient stress level? Sure. I just don’t know where that will come from during the term (three more weeks– curse this stupid trimester calendar!).
(Suggestions for low-overhead ways to be more chill are welcome in comments.)
Smoke pot?
Smoke pot?
That would certainly be one way to remove the stress associated with having a job, yes…
I’m afraid that in my experience the tenure decision is not the magical stress reducer that one might imagine. My activities and responsibilities certainly didn’t go down at that point: students keep coming to class, the grad students still need to be fed. Suddenly, the institutional committee work that the untenured are “protected” from ramps up sharply. And let’s face it: review by one’s institutional colleagues and professional peers never really stops, and neither does the sort of critical self-review that prevents many of us from just letting that lecture or grant proposal go without polishing it one more time.
My point is that we all need to find a way to deal with stress that works better than imagining that it will go away on its own at some point in the future. My own stomach problems are definitely better when I figure out how to get time for some hard exercise, though finding piano time also does some good. Maybe yoga does it for some. For me, travel or nights out with friends don’t cut it: activities can be fun without being relaxing. I need the hard focus on something completely unrelated to work.
After the birth of my 4th child, I had a hiatal hernia that caused constant heartburn. I heard a lot of depressing advice about how I would need to live with it and pop antacids all the time, and then I decided to go out on the Internet and see if I could find some alternative advice.
One piece of advice that made sense to me was to drink 12 ounces of water first thing in the morning, wait a few minutes, and then bounce on my toes 100 times. The theory was that the weight of the water would pull the stomach back down where it belongs, relief the pressure on the hiatal valve, and allow the haital valve to tighten back up.
I began drinking 12 ounces of water first thing in the morning and then bouncing on a mini-trampoline 100 times. After doing this for about a week, the heartburn eased, and a couple of months of daily bouncing made the heartburn disappear completely. It’s been about 5 years, and I haven’t had heartburn since.
I am not a doctor and I don’t know whether you have a hiatal hernia, but this worked very well for me.
Chamomile tea? (It’s a mild tranquilizer.)
I was reading one of your earlier posts on “idiopathic” problems — something with which I sympathise more than you can know, given that I too have an “idiopathic” allergic reaction to…something…, and an “idiopathic” acute macular neuroretinopathy which makes reading small print an absolute bloody *ahem*. But anyway, I digress.
What I really wanted to ask was, are you still taking Zantac? Given that the primary function of Zantac is to decrease stomach acid, and that I got the impression that the onset of your acid reflux happened shortly after you started taking Zantac (is this correct?), I find it especially weird and wonder if there is some kind of connection. Zantac acts on the nerve receptors of the stomach to tell the stomach that it no longer needs to produce acid, though, as I understand it; could it be that it has fooled your stomach into thinking that it has *less* acid than it actually does, which would lead to the sphincter which generally protects against reflux relaxing?
It’s just an idea, and might be completely wrong, but I would like to hear what someone with more expertise than I have says about it.