Wednesday, 1 August 2012  My heartburn hell...  When I was 16
and studying for my GCSEs, I was rather worried as you can
imagine, and also pretty keen to do well. I would sit at my desk
for hours each day, teaching myself the syllabus for each
subject, dissecting past questions, and generally doing all the
right things. At the time, I was drinking quite a lot of coffee
to keep myself alert, and after a while I gradually noticed an
annoying pain in my lower chest, right in the middle of my
diaphragm. I couldn't quite place where the pain was, as it went
up and down, but it was something between hunger and nausea. At
the time I went to the doctor about it, but he just told me it
was down to worry and sent me away. After my exams finished, the
pain mysteriously went away and I didn't think about it again.
Until about seven years later, I had signed up to spend a year
teaching English in Japan. I had no idea where I was going to be
sent, did not know a soul in Japan and felt generally rather
uneasy about the who