On Being Sick to My Stomach…and BEYOND!

At first, I wrote about how sometimes you just really need a big sloppy meal. I reveled in all the grease, all the salt, all the sugar, and all the guilt that comes with indulging your once-in-a-while dip into the bacchanal of bad-for-you. Then I followed it up with, what turned out to be, a continuation as investigated the phenomenon of “how bad is bad enough to toss these vegetables I promised myself I would eat?” Well, as some of you may have guessed (and one of you was brave enough to put in writing in the comments of my last essay): my next and, GOD HELP ME, last essay in this series arrives: on being sick to my stomach…and BEYOND!

So, yes. I got food poisoning. In fact, it was so bad I might go so far as to call it food-attempted-murder. Over the course of just a few hours, I went from an only-kinda-young guy ripping golf shots off the fence at a driving range to a shivering, quivering, sniveling husk of what once was a healthy human but now more closely resembles a medieval pauper who has never had a nutrient in his life. I was literally living the “screaming, crying, throwing up” meme…well not literally. I lacked both the strength and the control of what was coming out of my mouth required for screaming.

I spent what felt like ages praying at the altar of the porcelain god. And then, it was over and I felt weak and defeated and like a shell of myself. But, I felt like I was through the worst of it. Oh, OH, OH-HO-HO was I wrong as I was but in the eye of my gastro-intestinal storm! I would make another pilgrimage to the unholy land that is the bathroom floor. I was burning up and sweating, I was freezing cold and shivering, I was wide awake and as tired as I’d ever been. It was, as any night with food poisoning is, one of the longest nights of my life.

And the next day, well it wasn’t much better! I was lost in a sea of tummy aches, rocked by waves of nausea, and barely afloat on a raft made of Gatorade and eventually a little chicken noodle soup. By the end of the second day, I felt like I could finally see light at the end of the tunnel. Finally, I could watch commercials for fast food without my insides doing more flips than Simone Biles.

At this point, you’re probably intent on turning yourself into an Inspector Clouseau of cuisine. “Well, he did write an entire essay about possibly eating food that had gone bad. It was probably some nasty spinach or something.” Ah, but my fine food detective that was but a red herring, what probably made me sick as a dog was some kind of…relative of a herring: my forensics team and I have narrowed it down to either a fish burrito or bagel and lox sandwich. Needless to say, there are plenty of fish in the sea, but none for me, thank you very much.

What about you? Has food poisoning ruined any foods for you?