Death by Smoothie

The Boyfriend tried to kill me with a smoothie a few weeks ago.

I had been doing laundry downstairs in our apartment complex, my usual weekly ritual on Friday afternoon. I had come back upstairs to our apartment after transferring all of the clothes from the washers to the dryers because I was thirsty. There’s no ventilation in the basement laundry room other than a fan installed in a half-opened “window,” so it’s very easy to get hot and thirsty while down there for any extended length of time.

The Boyfriend, seeing that I was parched, offered to pour me a smoothie while I put away the laundry detergent. He’d gotten a dozen or so bottles at the grocery store because he had a coupon or a discount or both or something. I drank the smoothie, something like “Amazing Mango” or whatever, and went back to the basement.

By the time the clothes had finished the cycle in the dryer, I was in pain. I was feeling a tightness in my chest and a sort of rippling sensation up and down my breastbone. I immediately realized that I was suffering from G.E.R.D. (gastro-esophageal reflux disease). I’d been diagnosed with it over Memorial Day weekend, and I’d read all of the literature on it that the doctors gave me at Kaiser and even Googled a bunch of information on my own. I thought I knew most of the foods that triggered severe reactions and had avoided them as much as possible. Mango juice was not on the list.

When I brought the finished (folded) clothes upstairs, I took a couple or three calcium tablets and hunted through the refrigerator for the smoothie. I started scanning the ingredients and found the culprit. The alleged mango smoothie contained the juice of more than four oranges! Citrus juice (or, more likely, citric acid) is one of the biggest causes of G.E.R.D., and I had removed it almost completely from my diet. Or, at least, I thought I had. I gave up a lot for this stupid disease. I had cut down on chocolate (a very tough sacrifice), I had stopped drinking carbonated soda, and I had even started drinking less alcohol—all triggers. And then The Boyfriend gave me a mango smoothie on Laundry Day.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure that he didn’t intend to kill me. There’s no insurance money for him to gain, nothing like the plot of Double Indemnity or anything so sinister. He didn’t know that the smoothie manufacturer used orange juice as a major ingredient in what was purported to be a mango smoothie. I’ve started to read labels a lot more carefully, and I’ve found that lots of foods you’d never suspect actually contain citric acid.

I’m certainly never going to take a swig of another smoothie without knowing what it contains and no matter who hands it to me.