#downwiththesickness

The stomach flu sucks. I’ve got a pretty decent immune system (I attribute it to eating dirt and drinking dirty stream water as a kid), and I only get really sick about once a year. Maybe that’s why debilitating sicknesses feel so life-threatening. Sunday night (when it all went down), I remember being bent over the grass in Blake’s front yard, spewing my guts out, and then collapsing in the grass and just lying there shaking and staring up into the clouds. 

I feared someone would have to call 9-1-1. 

It just felt so scary. 

I never did care for vomiting. 

This is how it went down: I started feeling nauseous when Ashley and I got back to her place from picking up the girls in Lexington. I attributed it to a combination of too much fiber and too little food; subsequent trips to the toilet, sitting there and squeezing and clutching onto the sink counter with white-knuckled fingers, assured this attribution. I felt fine driving to Blake’s for the season finale of The Walking Dead, but video games made me feel sick to my stomach. The onset of diarrhea, coupled with involuntary spasms and spewing fiber bars all over Blake’s lawn, led me to the conclusion that I was, indeed, sick (and not just suffering from too much fiber, though I don’t that helped). I knew I couldn’t make it home without having to pull over on the side of the road, so I sped to Ashley’s. By the time I pulled into the driveway, I looked pale as a ghost, couldn’t stop shaking, could hardly walk, and felt pain all over. She knew what I was thinking, could read it in my eyes, and she said, “Anth, you’re fine, you’re just sick. You’re not dying.” I couldn’t keep warm all night long, and I couldn’t stay hydrated, either. Monday is remembered as a mere blur: lots of sleep, Ashley telling me to eat crackers and shoving Sprite down my gullet, and then Amanda showing up somewhere in the mix and thrusting a banana down my throat. “He won’t resist if you get him when he’s asleep,” she said. I felt a little bit stronger Tuesday, but two slices of pizza from a restaurant in Kentucky soured my stomach. I felt sick much of the day Wednesday, and Thursday morning I recommenced vomiting. Most of Thursday was spent passed out in bed, the hours passing in a dream-like state. The end of the sickness didn’t come until Saturday morning: a one-hour poop in the dead of night that literally raised the water in the porcelain bowl by about 2-3 inches. Seriously, it was FILLED. UP. I sat there at 3 AM thinking, “It’s so amazing how much I’m releasing, I’m not even mad it’s keeping me up!” I was bummed that I left my book in the main room; this wasn’t the sort of poop you could waddle away from in safety.