Gastroparesis

My gastroparesis symptoms:

Eat a normal meal in a normal amount. Finish the rest of the evening feeling full but normal. Go to bed a bit early.

Wake up with an incredibly, uncomfortably full feeling. Burp acid repeatedly. Nausea is a constant. My stomach begins to twist painfully into knots.

Crawl to bathroom, because I've started to shake and get cold sweat all over. Get a bucket for my lap and sit on the toilet because once the puking starts, everything lets loose.

Projectile vomit up everything from dinner 15 hours ago. None if it has been digested, and it's now doubled in volume from the stomach acid my gut has been churning out since I started to eat. Try desperately not to vomit through my nose, since the acid is going to fry every bit of skin it touches.

Pause, wipe up both ends, wash out my mouth, saline spray what's left of my nasal passages and crawl back to bed for about an hour. Then it starts again with what I suspect is actually yesterday's lunch.

Rinse, repeat. Usually it happened three times at a minimum. The last time is what I always thought of as "the plug." There was always a solid mass that came up last that tended to stick in my throat as it passed and left me unable to breathe long enough to make me see spots. The diarrhea got worse before it got better, since much of the excess acid still runs through even if the food comes back up.

Charming, huh? It was always worse when my sugar was high. There's not really anything to find, Grumpy. It's caused by neuropathy. The nerve endings that are supposed to signal to your stomach that it's full enough to need to start contracting and pushing food through your system no longer work well enough. The reglan makes those muscles contract artificially - that's probably what newgrl is feeling. It's not particularly comfortable as side effects go - like purposely inducing stomach cramps. Greasy and high-fiber foods make gastroparesis worse since they take longer to digest in the first place.

Most of my symptoms disappeared with my transplant - now that my blood sugar is perfectly controlled with my new pancreas, I hardly ever take any reglan, and I've only vomited once in the three years since my transplant.