9:21 AM, Nov 28, 2006
Fluid Displacement
I just passed an entirely wretched night. For an unknown reason, I was unable to get to sleep for a while. Then, finally, I settled into a fitful, restless, uncomfortable sleep at about midnight. That was the longest I slept all night. During that time, my dreams were of the tenuous repetitive sort in which there's always a problem, but it never gets resolved. The kind of dreams that you begin to consciously notice after a while, and wish they would change.
At 3am, the call of nature hit me with the ferocity of a bucket of ice water being splashed on me, and with such urgency that I had to actually run the ten feet from my bed to the bathroom to avoid soiling myself.
I was back in bed by about 3:15am, hopefully for the night. Unfortunately, the bad time was just getting started. At about 3:45am, the same call of nature hit me, and I made the same clumsy run to the bathroom as before. After I washed my hands, I filled a glass of water, and a took a gulp or two. I stepped back to my bed, and like a sudden surge of high-pitched music in a horror film, my stomach lurched. It was 4am.
I ran into the bathroom and unloaded my stomach into the toilet. About a third of it, as it always does when I vomit, came out my nose. So I spent the next two hours drifting between one consciousness and another, breathing through my mouth and unable to swallow because my swollen sinuses had completely blocked off my nasal passage. Also, in the next four hours, I had five or six more desperate runs to the bathroom.
Up until it was time to get up, I was of the opinion that I could still make it to work. This was foolish thinking. But I also started thinking about what could have made me this sick, this fast, and a little man in my brain presented a file to his supervisor: "Food Poisoning." I had Thai food for lunch yesterday, without any meat in it, so I doubt that would have caused it. I received a bag of custom trail mix from home that was very tasty, but it sat for for days before I claimed it at the leasing office. But for dinner last night, I used some pretty old wheat bread, and some possibly expired turkey and mayonnaise to make some sandwiches. I think that's it.
By 7:30am, over an hour after I had wanted to get going, I decided that work wasn't for me today. I still feel horrible, but I at least have one nostril.