When you have a uterus, abdominal pain can mean anything. It could be your period, ovulation, an ovarian cyst, ovarian cancer, appendicitis, PCOS, gas, anxiety, or death. It could be any of those things and statistically speaking it is most likely gas in which case a yoga teacher on TikTok will tell you to “do some cat cows” and Google will tell you to lie on the ground as time, or gas, passes.
Gas is defined as a buildup of air. That’s not really what gas is, look it up if you’re curious. Gas can be a lot of things. There’s carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and at least 4 more elements on the periodic table. Gas in your body comes from the digestion process. It can also come from anxiety, which doesn’t make sense. Or wait it does, it means that your emotions affect your digestion. My med school app is pending as we speak.
Waiting for gas to pass is usually the only cure. The passage of time itself. Time is a gas. An odorless, colorless gas that takes us from birth to bat mitzvah to internship to marriage to divorce to marriage to death.
Time can contort your body into weird shapes. Time makes you taller, eventually. Time makes your hair grow even after you spontaneously got a bob on the set of your TV job that one time. Even bobs cannot stand up against time. Sometimes you’re curled up in a ball on the floor. Not from gas, but from a boy. A boy can be the worst gas of all.
There are so many products to alleviate gas in a pharmacy. Powders to dissolve in your drink, capsules, liquids, probiotics, prebiotics, present biotics. You would know this if you too were killing time in a Duane Reade while you wait for your prescription to be filled.
In hindsight, going to the pharmacy during lunch time during flu shot season was not smart. The crowd was your classic Park Slope sample group. There was a guy playing the NYT Crossword connections game on his phone while rocking his baby back and forth in his stroller while the baby sucked on an organic apple pear pouch. The older guy who complained about how long he was waiting in line for his meds when this would never happen in the Berkshires. He splits his time between Brooklyn and the Berkshires and in the Berkshires, it’s a small town feel. There, the pharmacists all know you by your first name and you never have to wait in a long line of simpletons. When you’re ever stressed, go to the Berkshires in your head.
There were many other people in line, too. Young and old, blonde and brunette, Democrat and Socialist. And everyone was there, waiting, beholden to the gods of time.
Waiting in line is like waiting for gas to pass. The only way out is through. You might be quoted a wait time, and that might be accurate or not. You might think you’re going to be in line forever and then, boom, a big burp. In these cases where you have no control, you just have to wait.
When babies have gas, they smile. Maybe because it’s an involuntary muscle response, or maybe because they know deep down that farting is one of the funniest things we get to do with our time on earth. We are all just walking around, all day, exchanging gasses. In and out, one foot in front of the other, as the world turns. Spins? Rotates? Maybe one day the world will stop spinning and then the guy from the Berkshires will have something bigger to worry about than the long line at the pharmacy. Time will tell.