Warning: Graphic and disgusting subject matter. Not for the faint of heart. Reminiscent of my prior post on the topic: The Diarrhea Diaries. Which, as it turns out, was volume one of an unfortunate series.
*
Dear Diarrhea:
The US Food and Drug administration recommends two to four servings of fruit per day.
I don’t think they had this in mind:
BEWARE KILLER MELONS!
If you visited the CNN article I referenced, you get why I fear produce. If you didn’t trip the above link, the 20-point, bold font title of the article pretty much says it all:
“Multistate salmonella outbreak linked to pre-cut melon”
Now the fact that pre-cut watermelon has been spreading salmonella throughout the midwest wouldn’t ordinarily concern me except for two things:
- I ate some pre-cut watermelon Sunday.
- Monday began a marathon that makes the prospect of running 26 some miles actually pleasant by comparison. This is not that kind of marathon.*
I did not buy my melon at any of the stores referenced in the CNN piece on salmonella contaminated fruits. This does not stop me from putting a very strong set of coincidences together and coming up with a likely culprit to my week spent regretting everything I’ve ever eaten that I did not personally sterilize in a 1400 degree Fahrenheit kiln.
I spent the last (gets calculator, does math) 168 hours visiting the powder room. HOURLY. Sometimes more frequently. A brief itinerary of my adventures can be summed up this way:
Day 1: 6:00 a.m. – stomach lets out initial howls of protest. By 4:00 p.m., I am so sick, I’m curled up on the floor of my son’s therapy office wishing I didn’t have to drive us back home.
“Can’t we just live here?”
Day 2: After waking all night long to tango with the toilet, fever strikes and I shake my digital read-out thermometer convinced it has to be wrong.
Day 3: Have decided that having a will to live kind of sucks. Scrounge through medicine cabinets to find decade’s old Tylenol and take it, hoping it will kill me.
Day 4: Fever finally breaks and I would celebrate, but I’m getting low on toilet paper and there seems to be no end in sight.
Day 5: Am now reconsidering my agnostic stance and will willingly convert to whatever religion will cure me.**
Day 6: There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but I suspect they are the tiny sparks as each of my brain cells implode from dehydration. I gird my loins and guzzle Kefir straight from the carton.***
I wipe curdled cream from my lips and scream:
“Take that, you plague-ridden, bacteria bastards!”
Today is Day 7. It has been a week and, slowly, I am feeling somewhat human. Though, of course, the diarrhea hasn’t given up trying to kill me. I counter its vicious attacks with a chemical carpet bombing of Gatorade and Live-Culture acidophilus pills.
I’d really like this to be the worst thing that will ever happen to me, but I known I am just not that lucky.
As for whether this was a case of Salmonella or not, who knows? If it wasn’t, I sincerely pity the people who’ve had it worse.
If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the bathroom…freshening up.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*Hint: it was not a Law & Order Marathon either.
**I’m looking at you, Vishnu, you beautiful blue man. Although, Shiva the Destroyer makes more sense in the circumstances.
***Kefir – the sound you involuntarily make after tasting fermented yogurt drink. Which tastes just as bad as it sounds.
Feature image stolen from UK Pinterest site. Please forgive me, I have no energy or desire to get my own watermelon and recreate your excellent work. Although, Gallagher’s work on expressing rage by smashing fruit with a giant mallet is starting to make a great deal more sense to me now.
TheDustSeason 
Food is just scary 😉
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I eat it pretty mindlessly. I’m just always surprised when it fights back!
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it is pretty shocking in so many ways…
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I hate to click “Like”, because it’s just so awful!!! Makes you want to dive down what Terry Pratchett called an alternate leg in the trousers of time and let another version of YOU deal with it.
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Terry Pratchett cures most ills for me. Perhaps it is time I got another book by the master to while away the hours until I’m healthy again.
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Trust me… referencing my recent post on the agonies of gallstones (and the bacteria-anihilating effects of industrial strength antibiotics), you ^can^ grow to love kefir. I hold your depleted digestive system in my heart (metaphor only). Hope you’re on the mend.
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Always get the good Kefir. Wallaby. Always. That stuff is a miracle and it tastes like heaven.
I am soooo sorry you had the sick, whatever the cause. We’ve all been there. It’s gross and exhausting. Glad you made it through.
Awesome warning, too. It makes me sad that anyone would read the title and then think there would be only pleasant descriptions.
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I had something called the Rotovirus last year, my son had it first, and we had to take him to hospital in the end, his hydration levels were fine but blood sugar was pretty low. Then he got better just as I went down with it, and then my husband who was on a lads weekend away in Lisbon (moral don’t leave your loved ones for lads weekends gentlemen it will only make you ill).
It reached the point where I had to send out help texts for basic foods because I couldn’t be away from a lavatory long enough to visit a shop!. Friends were posting immodium, bread sticks and other things through the door. The worst bit was making supper for McMini on the Sunday as he was recovered and I was going down with it. I wanted to throw up the whole time. The other was seeing if I could drink coffee, I’m not sure it even touched the bottom of my stomach before it came up again. I had a thumping headache from lack of caffeine and had to take pro plus pills because the headache wasn’t just the fever.
What I’m saying here, somethwat lengthily, is that I so, so, so, sympathise!
Glad you are feeling better. It sounds completely grim.
Welcome to the diarrhoea survivors club.
Cheers
MTM
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Rotovirus – so named because it keeps going in and out of you like a rotating door.
Also, I notice that you spell diarrhoea with an ‘O’ in the mix. (If you spell it this way, you are Australian, according to Google.) It just goes to show, the worse the disease, the harder it is to spell! (With cancer being a rare exception to the rule. Generally, doctors decided the more exotic sounding the disease, the more they could likely charge for it, I think.)
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Argh yes. It was grim, unlike the noro so called because it’s gone tomorrow.
I had to google the d word but that is my ‘correct’ spelling although I’m British. But Australians spell more like us. Whereas South Africans, spell more like the USA they spell Mum, Mom and call preschool kindergarten etc. Don’t quote me on this, but I have a theory that some of the differences in spelling are just down to the extent of Germanic influences among the original settlers. Although the American word for a tap, faucet, is French. So there we are. But early Australasians were mostly Scottish and Welsh … or Irish a la Fields of Athenry.
Cheers
MTM
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You are a veritable font of knowledge! Now I know who to come to when I’m struggling for an appropriately British witticism or unusual word!
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I’m not so sure it’s knowledge – more of a guess, not even an educated one at that, but I am happy to provide any witticisms that I think are British. 🙂
Cheers.
MTM
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Sorry you got sick! I’m eating lots of green stuff every day although it has been blamed for salmonella outbreaks from time to time. I’ll continue until the day it fights back…
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Cook it well and you should live to fight another day.
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I find it incredible it doesn’t happen more often. Just got through a week long bout.
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It certainly gives one a great appreciation for how long times really is when you spend it doing something thoroughly disgusting. You have my sympathies.
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