But what if you were violently, persistently ill, and not a single doctor in the country had any idea what was wrong with you? That's what happened to Thomas Wolfe, who suffered from an extremely rare disease that took four damn years to correctly diagnose. We tend to think that modern medicine has identified every possible disease a person can catch, but as we learned when we talked to Mr. Wolfe about his experience, that assumption is dangerously, hilariously far from the truth:

Having a chronic, potentially life-threatening illness is terrible, which is why we call it "chronic illness" and not "chronic victory." Luckily, medical science has advanced to such a point over the years that, for the most part, you can go to a doctor to get your symptoms diagnosed and treated with a minimal amount of leeching.

5 Prepare for the Nationwide Tour of Confused Medical Specialists

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My story wasn't much different than the prologue of any House rerun -- average guy, going about his day, when a mystery symptom shows up out of the blue. I was at a basketball game (doing security, in training to be a police officer) and vomited up a sandwich I had just eaten. No big deal, right? I chalked it up to just being what happens when you eat a concession-stand sandwich, but it happened the next time I ate, and the time after that. For the next year, I was unable to eat without vomiting, due to what would turn out to be a mystery illness that science didn't understand.

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This despite the food there being absolutely loaded with penicillin.

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I had avoided medical attention as long as possible, pretending nothing was wrong, self-medicating with alcohol until I eventually couldn't hide it anymore. After my illness forced me to quit both school and my job, I had to come clean with my parents that something was seriously wrong with me, and they brought me home. I went to our family doctor who, sure enough, had no idea what the hell was happening to me.

So, my family doctor referred me to a GI specialist in Pensacola, Florida. From there I went to a hospital in New Orleans, then to another in Birmingham, Alabama, essentially on a national tour of vomit. I've basically had every medical test except for the one to check for black magic curses and for four years, all of them returned a result somewhere between "fuck" and "all."

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I've done the "egg test," which involves eating powdered eggs laced with nuclear tracers along with dry toast and water, which is presumably what RoboCop eats when he runs out of baby food. The tracers are tracked through your system to test the rate at which food is passing through it. I've had an endoscopy, which is when they shove a camera down your throat to try to see what the hell is going on down in your insides. It can get down only so far though, so you'll often have to get a colonoscopy (i.e. asshole camera) too, sometimes at the same time.

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"Just be grateful I don't mix up the tubes."

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That's right -- I've had cameras plugged into both ends, simultaneously (if you want to visualize it, there are certain porn clips you can go look up). The colonoscopy was particularly fun because, before the procedure, you have to drink a liquid that tastes like lemon-flavored ocean and turns your shit into hot water. I have fart PTSD now.

Then there was your run-of-the-mill bone marrow biopsy, the slightly more interesting esophageal manometry (they basically shove a tube up your nose to measure the pressure in your stomach), and something called a nuclear Debray, about which I can remember no details because I had more opiates in my system than Keith Richards in Qing China. I know it had something to do with scanning my stomach, but beyond that I couldn't tell you.