Careful, this one's gross

Be aware, this entry will get rather... gross. If you prefer not to read about it, flip back to the other entry for the day or something.

I've been home sick for a couple of days. It didn't start out that way... I have a project I've taken up at work involving redesigning a truly crappy application built for us by a contractor, one that I think can be done better in Domino Workflow, so I'm prototyping that replacement system. Took all the stuff home, and worked away at it on Tuesday, and planned to finish it up on Wednesday. No such luck.

I woke up at 6am on Wednesday with the sense that I was going to explode. Sure enough, I waddled the 20 feet down the hall to the bathroom, negotiating the stacks of lazy cats in the hall, sat on the toilet, and pretty much exploded. It was horrendous... I thought my guts were going to go out with it.

Now, sometimes this isn't an unusual thing. If I've been under stress, or if I've been out drinking too much or something, this can happen the next day, but it's usually a one-time thing.

Not this time. I got back in bed, and ten minutes later, went in and exploded again.

And fifteen minutes later, again. And again.

By noon I had been on the toilet at least a dozen times, the output more and more clear each time, and still, every time, it was like a water ballon breaking my ass. The toilet paper had vanishingly less residue on it, and I was starting to feel dehydrated, not to mention wearing out the flapper valve in the toilet tank.

As is my way, I got on the net to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Queasiness, cramps, diahrrea... everything pointed toward e. coli. Some sort of weird vengeance for that YouTube thing I did the other day. I had in fact eaten at Taco Bell in the preceding week... I called up Kaiser. The advice nurse asked me, "do you want to come in for an appointment?"

"Well, do this math," I said to her. "I've been going to the toilet every ten or fifteen minutes for the last eight hours, and I live an hour's drive from the nearest Kaiser facility."

"Oh," she said.

She suggested drinking a lot of water to stay hydrated, and if anything started bleeding, to call them back.

Gee, thanks.

No, no, that sounded rather more snide than it should. They were actually very helpful, it's just that there've been times when Kaiser would be a hell of a lot more helpful if they weren't 60 miles away. Like, when I broke my eardrum last year.

Mercifully, by about nine or ten last night, the interval of having to waddle down the hall over sleeping cats had stretched to about an hour, and I wasn't feeling as dehydrated. I took some Advil for the dehydration-induced headache and back spasms, and went to sleep. Somehow, I made it through to this morning, and as I told Suzanne in email, was delighted that the last time I went to the bathroom before leaving for work, nothing came out!

I think I lost about ten pounds in water weight alone. At least a gallon and a half of water must have leaped from my anus.

There, aren't you glad you read this one?