Sudden, severe and debilitating stomach pains
I am a male in my early 50s, and have been living in a rural area with rain water tank supply for over 20 years.
About 8 years ago I began to suffer from sudden, severe and debilitating stomach pains. I went to my GP. He did a number of tests and scans, including a referral for an ultrasound, all of which came back clear. After a few more months of suffering intermittent episodes I was sent for an endoscopy where a camera was poked down my throat and into my stomach. This too was all clear. My GP was baffled, and so we looked at my diet and started a process of elimination, thinking it may be an allergy to a food.
I had a normal Kiwi diet, steak, chips and veges etc. Over time it became clear to me there was no rhyme or reason to the onset of the pain, through my diet. None of the foods could be eliminated as the cause.
One day I was working at a location and had forgotten my lunch. It was starting to get hot in the sun and I drank a big quantity of tap water. I didn’t want to leave the site to get something to eat, preferring to stay and finish the job and leave for home early. Within an hour of drinking the water I was bent over in pain, and decided to leave and drive home as the pain relief medication my GP had given me (which only marginally worked) was there. Even on this occasion, when the only thing I had ingested was fluoridated tap water, it never crossed my mind that the fluoridated water was the problem, as we are all brought up to believe it is a marvel of modern science.
A few months later my family and I stayed in a motel located in an urban area. I came down with the stomach pains again. I had drunk the tap water. That’s when it occurred to me, as I started thinking back over the times the pain came, especially back to the occasion when I had forgot my lunch, whether it was related to fluoridated water. It was a ‘Eureka Moment’.
After the pandemic I received a referral to a gastro specialist in the hospital. By this time I had strong suspicions fluoridated water was the culprit. I had not drunk fluoridated water for a long time and had not suffered from the pains. During the consultation I told the specialist that I felt the fluoridated water was the cause of the pains. She looked at me with a blank expression, as if I had uttered some kind of blasphemy, and said in in a highly animated fashion “NO! NO! NO! That’s not possible!”.
The consultation ended with a green tick of health, and an instruction to contact my GP if pain returned. That was two years ago. I have strictly kept away from fluoridated water, always checking/asking the source of it if I am in a city area. The doctor’s probably think they ‘cured’ me, but I know 100% the pain only occurred when I drank fluoridated water.
p.s. forgot to mention that the COVID lockdowns were a major realisation period for me also, being homebound for months and having no contact during that period with fluoridated water, and no stomach pains at all. Whereas before, it was a couple of times a month, whenever I ingested tap water outside of the home. The lockdowns helped me to put ‘2 and 2 together’, that fluoridated water was the problem. And when the lockdowns lifted, that’s when I was referred to the gastro specialist.