I got food poisoning this week. Holy shit, guys. No one told me you’ve never truly had your assed kicked until it’s been kicked FROM THE INSIDE.
Let me take you back to last Friday, when all of Georgia was freaking out about a potential light dusting of snow (in my area anyway). Grocery stores pillaged. Zombies stumbling through the streets. People out here prepping like it’s the second coming of William T. Sherman.
I went to the bookstore to try to get some regular work done, expecting that no one would actually show up. There, it seems, I consumed a frozen meal stored for exactly this purpose. Everything seemed fine. Not expired. Nothing to notice or worry about. My memory of the event is blurred by what followed.
Great googly moogly. Fatigue. Back pain. Side pain. Front pain. Headache. Fever. Chills. My eyeballs were sore for some reason? The ghost of my father appeared and said the throne of Denmark had been usurped by my uncle? An unholy mashup of “Sleigh Ride” and the “FOX NFL Theme” played on a loop in every room I crawled through on my way to the toilet.
A friend of mine once told me that English teachers in other countries play this joke amongst themselves. The teacher stands in front of a room of English language learners and writes the word “diarrhea” on the board. They have the students sound out the word phonetically, and then try to have them guess what it means. “A beautiful kind of flower,” some inevitably say or, “a genre of diaphanous song.” In fairness, if you don’t know, it looks like a pretty word. Then they are told the truth, to their utter horror.
Sorry, I blanked out for a second.
My brain got kidnapped and taken on an etymological expedition to figure out why diarrhea is spelled so weirdly. Turns out it’s Greek (and later Latin) for “flow”. Appropriate, I guess, although I’m never looking at a Progressive Insurance ad the same way again and I’d offer “intestine-shredding-geyser” would have been a better choice. Also, if you like scatologically-themed etymological excursions, you should read this.
Anyway, it was a literal shit show. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even listen to a podcast, much less read. Nothing but writhing for days on end.
I went to the doctor and she was like, “Eh, the infection’s gone, but you’ve got a few days or possibly WEEKS of misery ahead of you.” Apparently, to kill an infection like this your body over-produces stomach acid, cranks up the temperature, and tries to put you in a coma until the bad guys are … eh… forcefully expelled. Unfortunately, this has the double-effect of scraping out your own stomach and intestinal lining along the way. I’m over here literally bleeding out from the inside. What a goofy, Home-Alone-esque stragegy to deal with invaders. “Let’s pour a shipping of container of moltent lava through the hallways. That’ll flush ’em out. We’ll worry about the repairs later.”
That wasn’t even the worst part, though. The misery she referred to was not the initial pain or the discomfort of hourly crapping oneself to death. Oh no. The misery was the food I was allowed to eat once I could eat again. Bland. Boring. Beige. “I want you devoid of any joy or pleasure in life. Think depression rations,” the doctor said, making, in my opinion, a fairly forlorn double entendre. “If it’s too fancy for a Gulag, it’s too fancy for you.” No spice, caffeine, dairy, or flavor of any kind. No flavor. Dried bread. Rice. Applesauce. I’m over here ready to sell my soul for a goddamn morsel of cheese.
My wife makes a delicious meal for herself and my children. I’m in the corner nibbling on Saltines like a poor mistreated orphan of the culinary universe.
I’m mostly better now. On the mend at least. But shit. What a journey.
All that to say, I would not have survived the Oregon Trail. At the first signs of dysentery, my party would have just hauled me off into the woods and shot me to silence the incessant whining.
About Joshua Rigsby
Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small southern town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.
