(Warning: toilet Talk Ahead. You've Been Warned)
As far as I know, there are two common reactions to food poisoning.
On the one hand, there's the stomach-clenching, fever inducing cavalcade of vomit and dementia common to, say, uncooked chicken that has sat on the counter for three hours.
On the other hand, there's the food poisoning that leaves your mental capacity in perfect functioning order, and doesn't require puking, but manifests itself in a stream of diarrhea so urgent and unrelenting, you wonder if you're going to shrivel up into a dehydrated raisin while still crapping and crapping and crapping.
This weekend involved food poisoning of the latter persuasion.
Friday night, Melissa and I ate at a local Mexican restaurant, where I satiated my desire for seafood by ordering a crab and shrimp chimichanga. It wasn't the greatest culinary masterpiece ever created, but it filled the hunger hole. We hurriedly ate, and then dashed off to watch the interminable cinematic chunder-fest known as "Mona Lisa Smile."
QUICK MOVIE REVIEW ASIDE: If you want a formulaic splash of saliva thrown in your face, complete with stereotypical characters practically drawn from a book entitled "Make Your Own Predicable Movie Characters In One Easy Step," this is the movie for you. The flick had a string of great actors called upon to play roles that could be realistically portrayed by pretty much anyone.
Although the movie was definitely excrement-worthy, I'm fairly certain it was the Mexican meal ingested previously that led to the defecatory nightmare I endured the following day.
Melissa had her family Christmas on Saturday, an event that started with Christmas dinner at Applebees (weird, I know, but you have to know her family to fully understand). I regarded the meal in front of me with growing revulsion, and I had no idea why. Something inside me was saying, "wait, man, don't put anything else down here. We're still working on something from last night." I picked half-heartedly at the riblets in front of me, and asked for a doggie bag.
>From Applebees, we journeyed to Melissa's mom's house for a gift exchange. By that time, I was feeling particularly crummy. I tried laying on the floor in the hopes of settling my roiling stomach that sounded more and more like a busy steel mill with each passing minute.
The exact time of the first anal delivery was 4:38 p.m. I know this because I was staring at my watch when it arrived. I knew, with absolutely no doubt in my mind, that I wanted to be in the safety of my own place to deposit that which had deposited in my colon. It's just one of those things you intuitively understand. So, with some hurried pressure on Melissa to leave, we hightailed it home, where I ran to the bathroom and let loose with an deluge not seen since Noah sailed his Ark.
What transpired after that was an evening of diarrhetic torture. Every five to ten minutes, I had to shuffle to the bathroom to spritz out a couple cups or so of butt liquid at a time. I was running a slight fever, too, and I found it almost impossible to stay warm. But, it was the constant crapping that was, by far, the worst. Sometimes, I would think I was all done for that round, and I would stand up and start to leave the bathroom, only to do an about-face and scamper to the bowl yet again.
Seriously, I would rather have been doing the vomit thing. At least with vomiting, there's a feeling of accomplishment afterward. With vomiting, you can kind of gauge when the next bout will hit. You usually have a half-hour or so in which to nap and recover between hurls.
Not so with explosive diarrhea. There's no schedule to unrestrained trots. It sets its own schedule, and the time between poops is usually "NOW! RIGHT NOW! OH, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S PURE AND HOLY, RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW!"
I dared not sleep until I was reasonably certain the craps had left me behind, and it wasn't until 2:30 a.m. that I finally felt confident enough to risk sleep and possible bowel relaxation. In my feverish slumber, however, even then I dreamt I was sitting on the can.
By 10 a.m., the ordeal was finally over, and I slept luxuriously until 12:30 p.m. confident that I would not, in fact, shit in my bed.
And I was more thirsty than at any time in my existence. I'm swearing off Mexican seafood dishes for life. What a shitty experience.
Posted by Ryan at December 22, 2003 10:49 AM
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