A Bit of Undigested Beef

You may be a bit of undigested beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato, Ebeneezer Scrooge said to the ghost of his partner Jacob Marley.

I understand his sentiment.

We had leftover meatloaf last night. I had cooked it two nights before and then had a slice of it the next night, while Walt was in SF at the symphony. I reheated it for dinner last night, along with potatoes and salad.

About halfway through my slice of meatloaf, I realized I was feeling very full and didn't want any more so I gave the rest to Walt.

I came in here to my office to work on my journal entry. I was furious with myself because I had the perfect entry that I'd worked on most of the morning, a bit about the election that I really really was proud of...and then somehow forgot to save. That rarely happens. I was trying to recreate it and not doing very well, especially since I really wasn't feeling very well.

In fact, I felt so poorly that I decided to take a break and sit in the recliner. I cuddled up with Bissell and began to wonder if maybe I had food poisoning.

Walt had eaten exactly the same (including half of my dinner as well), so when he came downstairs, I asked him how he felt and he said he felt just fine.

Well, I wasn't fine and by 10 p.m., I decided to go to sleep for real. I had been up since quite early in the morning and thought that maybe sleep would cure me.

The thought flitted through my mind that I was feeling so miserable I might actually find myself losing my dinner. I tried to remember if I had ever vomited in this house, and couldn't remember any time when I had. The last time I remember losing the contents of my stomach was many, many years ago on a whale watching boat in Puget Sound with my friend Diane (a memory she still groans about today, and which I still enjoy, even with the bad conditions on the water).

I lay down with Bissell at my feet and the other dogs on the floor next to me and assessed the symptoms of my intestinal tract. I had pinprick shooting pains in my stomach and still that feeling that I could vomit at any moment. I had even brought a big pot with me in case something happened suddenly.

I fell asleep, but was awake again in an hour, that water-in-the-mouth feeling that, for me, always hails the arrival of a session of vomiting. I ran into the kitchen and did, indeed, lose my dinner. I stood there, bent over the sink, breathing heavily until I could go back to sleep again.

I returned to the couch, fell back asleep again and two hours later found myself bent over the sink again. This time the vomiting was a bit more intense and I do not recommend doing it unless you have emptied your bladder first, which I had not.

I finished vomiting, took off all my clothes, cleaned up, put on clean clothes and went back to the living room and back to sleep.

When I woke up at 4, I lay there for a long time trying to decide how I felt. I still had the pinprick sensations in my stomach, but wasn't as nauseated as I had been.

I got up around 4:30 and went to the recliner and didn't let the dogs know I was actually awake, when they finally came looking for me. That worked until about 5 a.m. when Bissell started getting restless and I realized he needed to go outside. The nausea was much better, but the stomach cramps continued.

I took Bissell outside and then raced to the bathroom where whatever was left in my intestinal tract burst out the opposite end from earlier in the evening.

I had two very impressive bouts of diarrhea and made the decision that I'm going nowhere today. We have tickets for Orpheus-X, which I don't have to review and I'm not going. I'm also going to send Walt to take Bissell to Petco. I'm going to try to stay quiet and maybe get some sleep.

My stomach is still cramping and I feel terrible, but I'm so much better than I was last night.

You can tell how sick I was in several ways: (1) I don't want to eat anything (though I'm trying to drink water so as not to become dehydrated), (2) I put off writing this journal entry for 12 full hours, (3) I have not checked any of my Scrabble games, or done anything of the things I do routinely each morning on the computer, and (4) as soon as this posts, I will get off the computer. That almost never happens.

Now I'm going to post this and try to get some more sleep.