Unease unrewarded

    Dad had an appointment with a new GI doctor today. Unfortunately, I had been there before. My former girlfriend Laura suffered from chronic indigestion, what at that time (the late '90s) was starting to be called acid reflux or GERD. We heard an ad for a clinical research study that would furnish free medications for GERD. She signed up.
    This is getting to be a very long story; I should warn you that there is a very limited payoff. The doctors office is in a split level building behind Providence Hospital. Returning to the present, Dad saw that the office he was visiting was on the Upper Level and assumed that this meant it was the second floor and worried that they might not have an elevator. So I went by to check and recognized the place. Because I was waiting for Laura in that upper level waiting area and she was in the lower level and she was mad as all hell at me that I would just bring a book and sit there and read instead of coming looking for her. When I got her home and she saw that I had built her a bed downstairs and then went and got carry-out pizza for her, she suddenly got a lot less mad.
    And the source of the unease came later, after she broke up with me. Because she followed up on the program, and used the medications. You remember those ads for the pills that would "stop the acid pumps" in your stomach? Well they really worked. They almost killed Laura. She recovered nicely; last I heard from her she was doing very well and has apparently gone into politics. But I was worried that the docs might have something similarly radical in store for Dad and his belching problem.
    Not so much. The doctor, like an internal medicine doctor who saw Dad before but unlike his previous GI doc, thinks Dad is just swallowing air. He has ordered x-rays for next Wednesday morning, which hopefully will tell us something. I suspect that Dad will be missing the previous GI doc, whose staff was a lot less competent, but who at least listened to Dad. We'll see. Anyway, no shutting down of acid pumps has so far been suggested.