You heard WHAT about me?!

One of the side-effects of having Cystic Fibrosis is that there are some digestive issues, mainly that I don't digest fats well. They sort go right through me without being absorbed unless I take medication to help digest them. It's not really a big deal as long as I stick to my prescription.

But it can be a problem if the medication or dosage isn't correct. In the third grade, my doctor switched me to a newer enzyme pill and it wasn't as effective as hoped. Instead of putting me back on the meds that he knew were effective, he insisted upon constantly tweaking my dosage. Unfortunately, this gave me some very bad indigestion and I often wound up with gas. On several occasions, I just couldn't hold it in and let out a few farts in class. That's embarassing enough but as my luck had it, my high-calorie diet made them particularly nasty. Even I was offended.

Because children are the cruelest beings on the planet, the rumor quickly circulated that I had to take "fart pills"; if I didn't take them, I'd stink up the entire classroom. This was the complete opposite from the truth but nobody would listen. Eventually, my doctor accepted that the medicine was wrong for me, returned me to the old regimen, and the problem cleared up.

This rumor haunted me throughout my entire public school career, however, and it probably handicapped my success with the girls, I'm sure. Even in 11th grade, eight years after the problem, people I didn't know would approach me and ask if it was true, did I need to take "fart pills"? By then, I'd developed enough personality so that people who were around me knew that past bouts with indigestion weren't my defining characteristic, but I was always taken aback by the ignorance and gullibility of strangers.


Then there was the one rumor that insisted that I was spreading rumors. Funny how a rumor can be layered like that. It wasn't the most rampant rumor but it reached my close friend and that was a problem because the rumor stated that I was intentionally spreading rumors so that he'd break up with his girlfriend. Now, nobody could actually say what rumors it was that I was spreading, only that I was definitely saying untrue things. I attempted to point out this fallacy but my friend wasn't having it.

Now, I've told this story before but it applies here. My friend was given to vanity and anything that cast him in a bad light, no matter how untrue, was intolerable. Rather than listen to his friend since preschool, he believed the rumor and accused me of being insanely jealous that he had a girlfriend and I didn't, jealous enough to spread vicious lies. After our art class, he punched me in the stomach, dragged me down two flights of stairs by my hair, jacked me up against a locker, kneed me in the groin and forced me to apologize for something I didn't do. Then he dropped me to the ground and as I lay there in pain, he spat on me. Of course, a crowd had gathered but nobody did a damned thing to stop the senselessness, not even the teachers who watched it all happen.

The silver lining is that he was approached after school that day, by a group of seven or eight people who heard what he did and didn't believe that I was capable of being such a jerk, given the loyalty I'd displayed time and time again. They bullied him into a corner, roughed him up enough to earn his full attention, then told him that if he was ever seen laying a finger on me ever again, he'd get the shit knocked out of him by every person there. He was, essentially, a coward at heart, so he fled with his tail between his legs and avoided me from that point on.

The catch is that I never asked a soul to do that, nor did they ever inform me of their actions. It wasn't until nearly eight years after graduation that one of my friends told me what happened. He's never lied to me, so I have no reason to distrust him on this one. Those eight people protected me just because, and never expected a thing in return.

But it was all due to the flimsiest rumor.

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