Dear Abbey

Dear Abbey,

I was sick and now I am better but the gastritis can come back very easily even without the parasites because it was bad and things are still easily aggravated. So, the best advice I can get is not to eat so much hot sauce (hate that one!) and stay away from STRESS!

Now, Dear Abbey, stress is a stalker. I have to hide out and not read the news and not talk to discordant people and not look at the bills, and all that there stuff or the stalker finds me. It even found me at the pool today when some high strung New Yorker lady had been feeding a feral  cat (dumb move) and then went to the bathroom. While she was in the bathroom, the cat jumped on her table and knocked over and broke the plate with her lunch on it. The woman screamed at the poor waitress that it was the hotel's fault for letting the cat in and they owed her a new lunch and what kind of a place was it? Now, the thing is that we all thought she was really stupid to feed the cat. The pool and the hotel are all part of the big wide world here. There is no gate the hotel would let the cat in... everything is wide open. It is the tropics, for god's sake.

This was not a personal stressor, but kind of lurking stress, dancing around my tranquility. A more personal stress can enter my orbit via a distressing phone call, a series of bummer thoughts. There are myriad entry points. You may have experienced some. I get one every month when ATT gets my phone bill wrong and threatens to cut me off. I had set up a five month suspended service thing (you even have to pay them to have no service) and this year they can't seem to remember from month to month. It is not easy to get things fixed up with that company in the best of times, but it is really hard from a Nica phone. Stress.

It is a major stress to get phone calls with bad news or distressing situations that I can't help. Abbey, you know all this. So my question is, should I, for the benefit of my stomach, take up some serious smoking of marijuana? I mean, I can work things out sometimes by prayer and meditation or 'reasoning' with friends, but maybe if I was already nicely stoned, the first impulse of the stress wouldn't hit my stomach and cause the initial damage. Maybe, if I smoked enough, I could get to the perfect place of "whatever" and end up being a much healthier person. What do you suggest?

I thank you in advance fro your help. I have read that marijuana is not a gateway drug and I really need to be vigilant about my good health.