The Trapped Gas

I love carrots. I could eat pounds and pounds of them. They are sweet, crunchy, not too filling, and damn good for you. However, I recently discovered something about carrots that left me in near unbearable agony for 24 hours. This is my story.

After consuming about a pound and a half of baby carrots late Monday night – two at a time for efficiency's sake – I found myself with a bit of discomfort in my upper abdomen, around the diaphram. I dismissed the slight pain as mere indigestion and proceeded to bed. Throughout the night, I awoke with the same discomfort, but it would quickly subside allowing me to easily fall back to sleep. The next morning, the same. I thought, "What the hell is going on?"

Later, things got worse. The pain became almost unbearable and I couldn't do anything to control it. I had, after some simple deduction, decided it had to be gas, and, given its location and refusal to escape, it had to be trapped. I proceeded to try Gas X, Pepto-Bismol, ginger ale, saltines, peppermint tea, even rubbing the affected area in an attempt to push the gas somewhere else, anywhere else. Alas, nothing worked. In a desperate moment, I even forced myself to vomit. This moved the gas down, but not out. The pain had now rendered me completely immobile, moist with sweat, and utterly fatigued.


I had heard about what they do when you come to the emergency room with trapped gas: after inserting a tube into your ass, the nurse will fill you with water and let the combination of gravity and suction pull the elusive farts from your bloated body. Needless to say, I was not ready for this.

My mother, a former gas-draining nurse, had told me to walk around, to pick my feeble body up off the couch and get things moving. This seemed to help. I was excited. She also told me that the culprit may have been those wonderful orange roots I had so gluttonously shoved down my throat the night before – something about the sugars not digesting fast enough. I couldn't believe it – my favorite vegetable had suspended my life in some distended, pain-filled dimension for one whole day; I will never get that day back. Tuesday night, I returned to my normal state, passing gas like a champ.

Let this serve as a warning to all carrot-loving men and women out there. I'm no doctor, but I'd now wager that eating a pound and a half of baby carrots, two at a time at 10pm, is a bad idea. Who knew?