Hunger pangs

Hunger.

It’s not the same as hungry.

Hungry is “Wow, listen to my stomach growl.” It’s “Man, I could eat a horse.” Or “I feel like I could gnaw off my arm.”

Hungry you can make jokes about. Hunger isn’t the least bit funny.

First, let’s be real. I haven’t had solid food in five days and I’ve definitely blown past hungry. But I’ve had three protein shakes a day, lots of fresh vegetables, even warm vegetable soup. I’m miles from hunger.

Still, I can say without any doubt that hunger is an agony none of us can, in our deepest, darkest moments, fathom. Because where I’ve been hanging out has been torture. And I’m not even close.

Hungry is grouchy and surly. It’s shaky and muddled thinking. It’s generally pissed off.

Hunger, I'm certain, is lonely. It’s hopeless. It’s thinking you’ll never be happy again.

Hungry is what Pooh would call a “rumbly in my tumbly.” Hunger is a pain that bites at the very core of your being.

Hungry gets better when something hits your stomach, even if it’s just warm broth. Hunger just gets angrier if what you put in your stomach won’t, in the long run, get you anywhere near sated.

Hungry is to hunger what possession of cannibis is to first-degree murder. It might be a gateway. More likely, it’s a wake-up call.

The first three days of this liquid diet were seriously rough. The third day, in fact, was deep and dark and hard to come back from. I began to question my reason for doing this; to wonder whether it’s really worth it. Intellectually, I know it is. But on the third day without food, I couldn’t see my way through.

Something happened, though, around noon on the fourth day. I seemed to turn a corner. I wasn’t sad anymore. I wasn’t ravenous. And for the first time in days, I could see the sun.

Church had just let out, and I suppose I could say God answered my prayers. More likely, though, it’s the cycle of hunger. When the body realizes that screaming bloody murder isn’t working, it lets up and regroups. The screaming will return at some point, of course. It has to. Self-preservation is a powerful instinct.

I’m hoping to fend it off as long as I can. I have just nine more days of this before surgery removes the glands that regulate “hungry.” After that, I won’t be able to eat as much. And I won’t give a damn.

Lucky me.

Not so much for the millions of people in this world — many, many of them children — who live with the hopeless, boundless pit of hunger day after day after day. Without protein shakes. Or warm soup. Or a corner to turn.

I lived for three days with an agonizing gnawing at my gut that nearly knocked me down. I can‘t imagine doing it for three months. Or three years. Or with three children.

Multiply three by 10 million and you’ll get the number of people on Earth who die from hunger each year. More than 925 million are under- or malnourished. In the United States, the richest country on the planet, 35.5 million people — 12.6 million of them children — skip meals, eat too little or go a whole day without food. One in 8 households is forced to choose between eating and paying for shelter and or medicine.

In a country that spends billions of dollars each year on new ways to kill people; that pays sports figures enough in a season to keep a small town afloat for a decade; that celebrates celebutantes and thugs and DJ Pauly D but not teachers; that wallows in fully 10 times the amount of stuff we need, it’s time we set our priorities straight.

In this day and age, with all of the resources of modern man, no one on this planet — not a parent, not a child — should have to live with hunger.

This pre-operative experience of mine — insignificant as it is in the grand scheme of things — has hit me broadside with a truth that was both foreign and abstract before now. In the words of my dear friend, DB, who has witnessed firsthand what most of us never will, we should be ashamed.