Calling Haydn Shaughnessy the Teflon man is likely to bring him out in a cold sweat.
About 14 years ago my digestive system began to rebel. The protest started, curiously, with my legs but it affected every part of the body from the eyes downwards. The digestion is an influential beast. It will surprise you just how influential.
Walking along a Brussels street after a session in the gym one day my legs suddenly stopped. I had every intention of walking back to my apartment nearby. The legs declined. The feeling of being detached from these important tools of transportation was complete. I could feel the legs in the sense of being able to touch the skin. I might also have caressed the calf to search for possible cramps. But the normal connection between legs and brain had gone.
Spooky.
Half an hour later, having made the hundred or so metres home, I stripped down and took a look. There below the waist line tucked into the crook of the leg was a huge lump, the size of a man's fist.
Two days after that the surgeon checked over the shaven skin at that very spot and assured me what I'd seen was my bowel. It can do this in men. They have two holes in the abdomen and the holes can grow. This surgeon offered to cover them with a stretch of Teflon fabric. Yes, think frying pans.
The brutal operation involved cutting from the navel to the pubis, laying the Teflon across the whole of the midriff, with a little cut out for each sperm chord and then stitching the Teflon in to the perineum. The abdomen is then stapled back together and so after counting to 10 the next thing I saw were three nurses pressing down on the scars because I had woken up with a rasping cough that was pinging the staples around the room.
Thus began 10 years of torture. To accommodate the Teflon, the surgeon prescribed intravenous antibiotics. I'd already been taking non-steroid anti-inflammatories for an inflamed shoulder. The two together created gastritis and a bleeding stomach. That was the start.
I have since read about many people whose illnesses begin with one event but who go on to suffer until their GPs get bored of hearing from them. Yes, there are people out there who give up hoping they can be cured.
In my case the bowel went into the most crippling gastro-enteritis; the first time it happened I could not move for three days. The sperm chords remained inflamed for two years making every step wince-making as they rubbed against the fabric.
The inflammation flared in a section of the stomach that permits food to begin its way through the digestive tract. Raw and bleeding, this bulbous area was subject to the normal dose of stomach acids that do what acid always does - burns.
Doctors said eat more roughage and the roughage, duly eaten, scraped over the tender raw digestive organ. The pain was so crippling that one doctor was kind enough to offer a shot of morphine. I like morphine. In one bout of inflammation after eating a piece of raw cauliflower, I lost a staggering 10 kilos in five days through the sheer twisting, sweating agony.
When it comes to digestive problems many doctors are fixated with the idea that fibre is the only answer. The assumption that a dietary issue is behind illness is a great step forward but there is a universe of knowledge out there awaiting them. Lesson one: fibre can hurt.
When I ate the wrong food, usually roughage, the stomach bloated rapidly and then put pressure on a nerve, the vagus nerve. This runs through the lung area and the pressure causes hyperventilation. The pain from a bleeding stomach and the mere fact of gasping for breath created some despair.
But get this. In the annals of Belgian surgery my name resides alongside a tick for "successfully completed".
Inflammation influenced the whole body. A slight shoulder injury became such an agonising inflammatory problem that the doctors offered surgery. Oh yes, please!
Herpes, which normally manifests on the lips as a cold sore, appeared in my eyes, creating ulcers that leaked acid into the cornea for months on end.
Inflammation flared up on various occasions in the hip, knees, spine and throat but settled in the stomach and bowel. This is a failing digestion at work.
Doctors prescribed treatment for gastritis and diagnosed the Helicobacter pylori bug, a bacterium that lives in the stomach and provokes excess acid production, as the culprit. I have never had a Helicobacter infection. Never.
Still I took the triple therapy of acid-inhibiting pills plus two antibiotics, time and time again and in due course suffered the fungal overgrowth that goes with over-consuming antibiotics. The worst, but not the only, manifestation of this is ballinitis, a man's version of thrush, a fungal infection in the most sensitive of extremities that causes a severe itch and makes even strong men wish they too could wear a skirt and walk around without knickers on. Candida overgrowth is sweet in comparison.
This, you can imagine, is a situation you really want to get control of. It is strange, counter-intuitive perhaps, to associate all these problems with diet. I didn't. For years I took the next therapy on offer feeling increasingly that the body had departed on a course of its own, leaving me with the consequences: pain and a wrecked life but no options.
In the search for clues about the real nature of illness it has never been less tempting to turn to orthodox medicine. This is different from saying it has never been less tempting to turn to science. Science has many interesting things to say about the human body, things that don't necessarily translate into medical orthodoxy or the treatment protocols of hospitals.
The science of epidemiology for example, embodied by a brave and radical scientist called Paul Ewald, makes a convincing case for saying that many degenerative illnesses, cancer, diabetes, heart problems, are caused by viruses and bacteria.
What Ewald also says is that we today face the problem of understanding the origins and progress of chronic disease whereas orthodox medical science established its body of knowledge from the observation and treatment of acute illness. The time frame of cholera is vastly different from that of cancer. Degeneration into cardiac arrest is a wholly different phenomenon from polio or the rapid inflammatory effects of meningitis.
The inference of Ewald's work is that inoculation and preventive attacks on viruses like chlamydia or human papillomaviruses and enhanced general immunity are the ways out of degenerative disease.
In one of those smart alec moments we quickly want to forget I said recently to a leading evolutionary theorist, if our bodies and minds are the product of natural selection over millennia, how come we use only a small portion of our brains?
This, I thought, showed natural selection to be a bit of a chump for gifting us the largest brain size of all mammals, proportional to our bodies, but with 60 per cent of it redundant.
"Easy," she smiled. She is Helena Cronin, my guide through the intricacies of evolutionary science. "The 60 per cent is probably made up of parasite genes."
So in all probability a large chunk of grey matter is a doss-house for genes that have no role to play in our lives. The same could probably be said of viruses and deadly bacteria. The flesh-eating strain of streptococcus lives up the nose of 15 per cent of the population and the two co-exist happily, bug and bloke. The herpes virus resides in a cosy backwater of my nervous system. Our bodies, in short, are not our own. To gain control over them takes knowledge and a strategy.