Strange Stomach Behavior.

Hello.
My name is Will and I am 18 years old, and have an interesting problem.

For maybe a couple years now I have been burping a lot every day, especially after meals. We were not sure what was causing the burping, but I noticed after eating things with dairy, I would feel full soon after eating. On june 9th, after partially eating a small bowl of cerial, I felt nausiated most of the day, and maybe with a little pain. We decided that I had become lactose entolerant. Each week after not having any milk, and sometimes cheese, the burping decreased, but never stopped. One day after having a sandwich with turkey, cheese, and tomato, my stomach began hurting, and made me feel nausiated for nearly 4 days. It hurt more in the morning, but once it got about 7 pm at night, I started feeling a lot better. It seems now I start feeling pretty good for a couple days, and then my stomach begins to just make me feel a bit queasy after eating, for a couple days, and then goes away again. A couple days ago I felt almost completely better, so I ate more that I usually did, and did not burp much the whole day. Yesterday, I was burping almost all day at work. I work at a golfcourse, and it was really hot, so I was drinking a lot, some of it was soda. After dinner yesterday I felt pretty queasy for almost 2 hours, then began burping a lot and evenutally felt somewhat better. I have not eaten today yet, but I feel pretty good.
Sorry to make this so long, I just wanted to give as much info as possible for an accurate diagnosis. If I had something bad, would it usually just get worse over time, instead of good, then bad, then good, over and over for weeks? The main thing I really want to know is, 1: Do I have something? and 2: is it life threatening?(ie stomach cancer)

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my problem.

[ggreg]

I'm just guessing, but it does indeed sound like your ideas about being lactose intolerant are right on target.  Milk is in a whole bunch of stuff, so even tho you're not eating cheese or milk products, it might be bothering you unexpectedly, so there are some tablets you can chew up to counteract the lactose thing.

As for all this burping, that's tummy gas, so you could try some alka seltzer to neutralize it and cut back on the burps for a while.  Sometimes store-brand sodas will goof up the tummy, too, so be sure anything you drink is name-brand.  Do a Google search for burps, and also a search on this forum for same word, and there are indeed bunches of people who have some wild burping stuff going on, maybe you can get some tips, if it continues to interfere with your daily life a lot.

One other thing, when I was your age, I had a lot of tummy gas on Sundays when we would eat the main meal in the middle of the day after church.  Gosh, it hurt.  My grandmother had it as a girl, too, so she told me about alka seltzer, which treated it.  But the ultimate solution was to eat moderate sized meals, same time each day, with not a lot of variation in schedule.  In other words, if you just eat a huge meal for dinner, well, it's going to create a sort of "traffic jam" in your digestive system, and trap air in your tummy, and it's going to try to find its way outta there, like with burping.

Those would be my ideas.  I hope you don't have anything serious going on, but the younger you are, the less likely that is.  You know that saying "old farts"?  Well, that's because older people have all these digestive problems.  Smile.