Why PancreasZen exists.

Me and Pasha, August 2025.

I'm Stepan. I've had acute necrotizing pancreatitis twice, in May 2023 and in November 2025, including an attack with a CRP of 463 that I almost left too late.

Both times the hospital kept me alive. And both times I went home with almost nothing in writing.

Intensive care, 16 May 2023. Day 6.

In 2023 I was given 2 photocopied sheets. One of them was pinned to a corkboard on the ward. I photographed it because I couldn't believe that was the whole answer.

One of the 2 sheets, still pinned to the ward corkboard.

Sun-faded, curling at the corners, held up with mismatched pins. No alcohol. Less fat. Eat 5 to 7 small portions a day instead of 3 big ones. Then a table of what's banned and what's allowed.

The bottom corner is branded knoll, BASF Pharma. BASF sold that pharmaceutical business to Abbott in 2001, which puts the leaflet at over 20 years old. That was the written guidance I got in 2023.

The bottom corner of that same sheet.

Then the dietitian handed me the second sheet. The wall sheet recommended rye bread. Hers banned bread. The wall sheet banned cream. Hers put cream in the sauces. One said margarine was fine, the other said margarine is harder to digest.

I counted 10 of those flips when I finally sat down and compared the 2 pages properly. Carp, tomatoes, cauliflower, mushrooms, egg yolks. Both sheets even manage to contradict themselves.

The 20 years between them probably explains it. It didn't make me feel any better. I was lying in that bed trying to work out what I was allowed to eat, holding 2 pages that disagreed.

So I started writing in that bed. Phone notes at first, because nobody could tell me what to actually eat on Tuesday.

That turned into 3 years of work. The fat budget in real grams. The meal structure. The flare protocol. The long-term monitoring nobody had mentioned. I tested recipes in my own kitchen and checked everything against the medical literature.

9 November 2025. It came back.

PancreasZen is that system, written down. It's the honest, practical manual I needed and couldn't find. It isn't medical advice and it won't cure anything. If it saves one person a hospital trip, or one night of fear, it was worth writing.

18 November 2025, a few days before going home.

Or if it just saves you 2 hours in the supermarket, I'll take that too. Those first weeks of shopping are their own kind of hell, standing in the aisle turning every packet over to find the fat per 100 g.