It was the Chair, I Mean, It was My iFart App

Posted by Anni on Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Image source: Ayruveda.ygoy.com

We all know the feeling—the clench, the abdominal pain—the intense embarrassment when our exit strategy goes horribly awry and we’re caught red-faced, stinking up the joint. It’s happened to the best of us, from politicians to movie stars to the Queen of England. Oh wait… this just in: the Queen has a lady’s maid who does all the farting. Ah, my mistake. But what a dream job that must be!

Gas is a fact of life, but excessive, every-day gas can be painful and difficult to manage, and it makes it hard to make friends. Without new friends, eventually you run out of other people to blame it on. The problem is, pinpointing the cause of excessive gas is not that easy to do. Sure, sometimes it’s clearly all those raw onions on your onion bread, but often there is no obvious dietary cause. Once those dietary culprits are ruled out, get excited because you’re in for some tantalizing diagnostic testing.

Image source: Famouschris.com

If you’ve never been in an MRI machine before, let me paint you a picture. You’re laying on your back while some soft music plays—usually either pop-style slow jams or elevator—designed to get you in a certain mood: bored, irritable, uncomfortable, annoyed, generally the way one always feels in a hospital. Then the doctor or technician or whomever gives you a “panic button.” Nothing makes me panic quite like being given a button for that purpose. Why do I need this? What are you doing to me? I don’t need prompting to panic, even under the best circumstances, and buttons beg to be pressed. Anyhow, next you slide into a coffin-like tube while metal parts slam together and make a buckling sound, as if this whole machine were out of control, like in Westworld. It’s not content to spend its days scanning people… it wants to eat people… starting with you! Here’s where I press the panic button.

Image source: Hearthealthywomen.org

Joking aside, MRI scans may reveal some gas-causing digestive track abnormalities, or they may not. Luckily there are lots of other diagnostic tests for figuring out the cause of excessive gas. Barium X-rays are pretty cool. You swallow a bunch of barium and it dyes your insides so an X-ray can pick up on structural problems. Then there are the camera tests—down one end or up the other—and the blood tests, out the arm.

Image source: Healthhype.com

Fortunately most cases of gas are transient and related to the food you eat. You may just eat too many beans, you may have a food allergy, or you may have something like celiac disease which is treatable with a special gluten-free diet. Worst case, you can make some serious money as a human whoopee cushion. Just wait on chairs until someone sits on you, then let loose! I think that would play really well on YouTube.

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