Possible Gerd?

My girlfriend has been unable to keep food down for the last year. Whenever she eats or drinks anything, within a few minutes she's spitting a lot of it back up. She had an endoscopy back in April and the doctor stretched her esophagus citing the problem as a lower esophagal stricture. He didn't indicate whether or not it was a hiatal hernia, but a few weeks after that she started having the same problem again. She's going to another doctor this afternoon to get checked out, but this guy seems kind of surgery happy as he told her mom, (it's her grannys doctor she's going to see by the way), when she talked to him that he knew it would take some kind of surgery and that he would do it for free. I don't know if he was referring to the stomach wrapping thing, whichis done laproscopically now or to an endoscopical type thing. I am terrified at the thought of my gf having surgery especially when every website I have been on to research gerd has inidcated that these days surgery is usually only a last resort if all else fails. I know that the endoscopy is a routine procedure or "surgery" as some doctors refer to it, though I don't think it really qualifies as surgery per say. Anyway, the thing is that a lot of you on here talk about constant heartburn as a symptom and while my gf has had heartburn or chest pains once in a blue moon, to my knowledge anyway, it hasn't been constant or chronic. what do you guys think? Help out a very worried boyfriend here if you would.