A stomachache woke me up at 3 AM. I regret to say it was a really bad one.
I knew the culprit, of course: a slice of Starbucks cake that was loaded with chocolate from the cream to the crumble. I had only one (1) slice, but it was clearly too much for one (1) person, or at least too much for me. (Does this mean I can be considered less than one person?)
Generally I know that too much sugar upsets your stomach, but I only just found out why: many desserts—like that goddamn chocolate cake—are packed with oligosaccharides, milk proteins, and fatty acids, which cannot be broken down very quickly in the body. So as this chewed-up, half-digested mass of sugars, fat, and protein moves through the bowels, it feeds the microflora in your intestines, and the gut microbes are PARTYING like there's no tomorrow in there. Clearly they're very happy about the abundance of nourishment that was just presented to them on a silver platter, and being the anaerobes that they are, they're fermenting and fermenting and fermenting all of that good stuff into short-chain fatty acids and a load of gas.
So what does this mean for the poor soul who ate too much chocolate cake? It means lots of gas and cramping. Peachy!
Anyway, I think I remember reading somewhere that Alka-Seltzer can help relieve this kind of stomachache. I don't know how much truth there is to that statement, but it was better than nothing and my stomach cramps were so bad I couldn't sit up straight, so I was willing to try. I had no Alka-Seltzer on hand, but I did have some of those effervescent multivitamin tablets. So I brewed myself a little cup of fizzy vitamin water and drank it slowly.
Once I downed it all, the stomachache was gone. From both ends, gas escaped the lumpy mass of flesh I call a body. It felt like nothing short of a miracle, but looking back I know there must be some sort of science behind it: a little razzle-dazzle acid-base chemistry and maybe a little extra something I'm not aware of that may seem like witchcraft to many people. But I was too relieved to think of anything at the time, so I crawled back into the comfort of my bed and drifted back to sleep.
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