Davening for Doughnuts

Step eight, in A Day in the Life, is: don’t eat, drink, or talk before you pray. This one I fail at. The don’t talk is next to impossible as the Little Rebbetzin starts out chattering at full concert volume from the second she awakes, while it takes me about a half hour to regain the power of speech after I awake in the morning. This is very unsatisfying to the L.R. since I am not upholding my portion of the conversation. Her solution is to ask questions that require an answer more complex than grunting, to force me into recognizable speech, this is not the big difficulty.
My real difficulty is with the don’t eat part. If I don’t eat every four hours, I will get sweaty, start to tremble, and finally blackout. As if that wasn’t enough, this will also trigger a migraine. A night of sleep is longer than four hours so when I wake up I need to eat immediately. The obvious question to ask is what do I do on Yom Kippur.
Q: What do you do on Yom Kippur?
A: Nu, it’s Yom Kippur, I fast. I eat all the carbs and protein that I can manage to keep down, right up until the last second, then I fill my pockets with aspirin and migraine medications, which I eat like they were candy, all during the day. Because I can’t drink water to wash them down I dissolve them under my tongue until I can swallow them. The year before last I had to take so many I had chemical burns in my mouth afterwards.
With Hashem’s help I don’t pass out and hit my head on the bima.
Q: What about Rosh Hashanah?
A: Good question, every year I go crazy because it’s not a fast day, but we don’t break until about 3:30 PM. I think why not just go another 2 hours and call it good for Yom Kippur too.
Q: Why don’t you do the same thing that you do on Yom Kippur?
A: Stubbornness, because it’s not a fast day, also the pills only allow me to remain barely functional, and it takes me three or four days to recover. And who wants to spend Rosh Hashanah wondering if maybe they could just take a power drill and make a few little holes in their head if it would let the pressure out, but of course you can’t use power tools on Yom Tov so that wouldn’t work, and meanwhile, hopefully my head won’t explode all over the Torah.
Q: So what do you do?
A: Usually suffer, and try to sneak some food. Last year I left the shul about 11:45 had some fruit and bagels, went back and was fine for the rest of the day.
Q: And the point of all this?
A: The point is that if I don’t eat before Shacharit I may or may not pass out in the shul but I will definitely have a migraine for the next three days.

So I make use of the ruling: It is better to eat so that you can daven, then to daven so that you can eat.