Food Poisoning Sucks

Note the time on this blog...4:55am or so.

There are few ailments that really bother me, because for most, there are remedies. The flu, colds, cramps, headaches, even migraines; I have something to take for all of them to relieve my suffering. The one that I'm completely helpless against however, is food poisoning. There is no pill or medicine you can take to ease that horrible stabbing pain in your stomach that wakes you up in the middle of the night.

I write about this of course, because we've all been there. Tell me this hasn't happened to you:

You wake up in night thinking; Whoa. I'm wide awake. What time is it? 12:30? You mean I've only gotten 2 hours of sleep? I wonder why I woke up. Oh wait...maybe it's that stabbing pain in my stomach. Damn it's gurgling quite loudly. I wonder if I have food poisoning. Ummmmm...wait....not good, NOT GOOD!

So you run to the bathroom where you get an up close and personal look at the inside of your toilet bowl and you are sooooo happy that you found the energy to clean it earlier that day. Then you just brace yourself for the waves of pain and sweat and chills and hacking and coughing and praying for a moment's rest. After the second wave, you start thinking about how you can POSSIBLY get some sort of relief from your agony. Then you do the math; I have about 2 minutes between each wave of illness. So, once this one finishes, I'll run downstairs, fill a mug with water, put it in the microwave for 1 minute 20 seconds, throw a tea bag in, run back upstairs and be back in time for the next wave. Your strategy works brilliantly. Except that you had forgotten you were going to have to stand in the kitchen, surrounded by food and that certainly didn't help the situation.

After your third or fourth wave, you're totally exhausted and would do anything to get back to sleep. Of course you can't take the chance of getting back in bed and having to run back to the bathroom, so the only logical solution is to make a pillow out of your bath towel, grab a blanket from the linen closet behind you and curl up on the bathroom floor. Then right as you are falling back to sleep, you realize you're about to freeze to death, so you'd rather take your chances in bed.

But once you're back in your warm and cozy bed, you have a dilemma. How do you sleep? You normally fall asleep on your stomach but if you lay that way, the stabbing pain returns. Same with on your back. So, you lay on your side. Of course, you can't fall asleep on your side, so you just lay there thinking about everything you ate that day, trying to find the meal that was the likely culprit. Cereal? No, that couldn't have been it. That pear? No way. Lunch? Dinner? Chicken soup? Pot stickers? That must have been it! Damn that soup and those pot stickers! Then you vow never to eat chicken soup and pot stickers again because certainly every dish must be contaminated. Just like the time you got sick after eating at El Taco Man and vowed never to return, but since their burritos are just so good, you couldn't resist.

So, there you are, approaching 3:30, listening to the smoke detector beep intermittently outside your door. Luckily, your sister gets up around 4 to get a glass of milk and you can tell her to go to the store and get a new battery for it tomorrow. A short time later you give up completely, hop on your computer to check your work emails and then find yourself blogging about your horrible night because you know everyone will sympathize with you. Because seriously...tell me you haven't had an experience JUST like that one.