Yesterday early evening about halfway through my run, my guts began to assert themselves as uncomfortable and ominously disturbed. “Oh no,” I thought and wondered at the cause. I barely made it home and felt expressions on my face of equal parts scowl, fear and concern. I ran immediately into the bathroom without letting Dylan know I’d returned. I began shitting and vomiting in earnest. I shivered and sweated and was struck by an extended depth of awfulness and agony of feeling. My wrenching and retching became eventually audible to Dylan. “Honey?” he said from somewhere nearby. His voice was tentative and worried. I didn’t reply because I had no ability to speak. I breathed heavily and spasmodically and pondered feverishly and weakly as I suffered. “Honey?” Dylan said again. Finally he discovered me and stood before me. He gazed at me mute with horror and dismay. I slumped and shivered and shook. I vomited from one end and explosion liquid pooed from the other. I slumped and spasmed and could do nothing but look terrible, feel terrible and suffer terribly. “Oh no,” said Dylan finally. “What’s wrong!” “Food,” I with delicate desperateness said. Meaning it’s the food we ate, something that we ate today, there must have been butter or dairy or eggs in the food, because look at me now. “But that’s not possible,” Dylan protested, “I made sure. The guy said he was certain and that he understood.” “Food,” I said again, gasping, grimacing and grim. It was all I could manage between the sweating, wrenching, vomiting and explosion liquid pooping.
“I’m sorry you have to see me like this,” I whispered weakly when I could. “That’s okay,” said Dylan, “You are my wife and I love you. I’m sorry you feel badly. Let me know if there’s anything you want or that I can do for you. Otherwise I’ll… leave you to it.” “Thanks,” I feebly replied. This entire exchange happened mostly telepathically. I was too sick and shivering and sweating and feeling both horrible and horrified to engage in courteous cordial conversation. I was drenched in so much sweat that my hair was wet and dripping and also streaked with vomit. My stomach churned and clenched. My face gagged out more vomit. The bottom half of my body quivered abominably.
I wondered how long this all would go on for. I felt I honestly could not further bear it. I wanted to go unconscious. I wanted drugs to make me feel nothing or to put me out and have my senseless spasmodic body deal with the horror of it all on its own while my mind blissed off and away elsewhere. I seethed and churned and would have called out like Job in the desert but didn’t like I said have the strength to speak or to cry. The whole scene was the most unsavoury of all nightmares.
Liquid death poo exploded out of my bottom at intervals. Gagging, retching and vomit spasmed out of my mouth at opposite intervals. My body churned and spasmed and shook. I was weak from the effort of being the vehicle of such a massacre. All my skin was wet and drenched. My hair streamed with sweat and vomit. Slumped over the toilet I despaired. No position I put myself into could alleviate my desperation, dreadfulness and dread. “This is the worst I have ever felt,” I said to nobody specific. Dylan was somewhere near but keeping a safe and respectful distance.
I was a living writhing slumped over afflicted form of pure death throes agony and unrelenting digestive twistedness and rot. All I felt was a seething subordination of impossible anguish and endless distress. If I believed in God I might’ve appealed to him. Instead all I could think and feel was, “Terrible, terrible, this is so extremely exceptionally terrible” and “Please wind down, please end, please stop” and “How can I survive this, I can’t survive this, this is bad, this is so very, very bad.” I shivered and slumped and exploded liquid poo everywhere whiled I clutched at my stomach and breathed shallowly as I retched and gagged and puked. Those of you who have never spasmed and exploded liquid poo helplessly and painfully from your body, it looks, smells and feels just as hideous as it sounds.
Probably worse. Definitely worse.
The silver lining is that this is the bottom of the barrel, the lowest point, the end of the line. The buck here stops entirely. Shit can literally look, smell, get or feel no worse. The other silver lining was to acknowledge, feel grateful for and learn that even when I’m covered in a shivering trembling spasming hour’s worth of vomit and liquid explosion poo, Dylan’s love persists, rings true and continues. Now that’s a husband.
Later when it was all mostly over, I gazed without strength at the details of the room around me. I was appalled at the aftermath. The place was like a crime scene visually both violent and violating. Liquid poo explosions covered all the wall and the whole toilet. Vomit was all over the floor in front of the toilet. “Deplorable,” I said gloomily and morosely, “Appalling. Shocking. Gruesome. Horrendous.” I couldn’t believe the mess I’d made. I couldn’t believe how awful I felt and still felt. I made fragile, tragic motions toward tidying it all up and cleaning. Dylan with actions as grim as they were gracious attempted to help. He moved with a quietness of duty and devotion.
Imagine if this harrowing and hideous intense reaction had happened anywhere when I didn’t have instant immediate access to privacy and a toilet. I could barely bear to deal with this whole experience, let alone to potentially suffer through it helplessly and hellishly in public. I never want this sort of thing to ever happen again. I never want to feel so awful again. I believe I have literally never felt so unbelievably terrible and awful and bad. That was to the letter literally the worst shit ever. Annihilation. Terror.
Dylan called the restaurant and spoke to the server trying to get to the bottom of things. We felt there might have been dairy or eggs in the tofu burger dish. The server insisted there was only tofu. Dylan reminded the server about how we returned a broccoli dish because it was covered in a sauce that included mayonnaise and therefore contained eggs. The server agreed to recalling that. Dylan asked again if there were eggs in the tofu burger. The server insisted no. Dylan said how about mayonnaise. The server consulted someone and said oh yes mayonnaise. “Mayonnaise has eggs in it you fool, ” said Dylan in a voice approaching a shout. “Do you not remember us sending back the broccoli dish because of the sauce which had mayonnaise and therefore eggs. She can’t have eggs! Mayonnaise has eggs in it! My wife is completely and terribly sick now! We said no eggs!” Dylan sounded very angry. The server said, “Oops.” I said later, “Poor man. He probably didn’t want for me to get so sick.” I added, “It’s like if you don’t have allergies you don’t take other people’s allergies seriously. It’s how we all are. Plus the ethnic cultural divide. Plus it’s like. Primary obviousness that’s tofu. Secondary is oh yeah there’s mayonnaise in the recipe. Third level oops there’s eggs in mayonnaise. So I get the confusion. Poor man.” Dylan cut me off. “It’s his responsibility as a restaurateur to be careful and respectful of these things. Look what he did to you! It’s his fault!” Dylan seethed. “Fuck. That. Guy.” “Poor man,” I said again dejectedly. Dylan gave me a look meant to silence my Canadian niceness. His look said this was no time for such Canadian apologetic response. Cause look where Canadian niceness can get you. I kept silent. I felt still pretty badly. I was depleted, deflated and weak. The whole scenario wreaked upon me great levels of both mental and physical disturbance and distress. I sat there hunched over, feeble, fragile, flimsy and faint.
Afterward I lay shivering beneath a massive pile of thick fluffy blankets and felt sad. Dylan made me green tea and hammered out a scathing review against the restaurant online. Among the various and several things Dylan is becoming famous for can be added a relentless and uncompromising string on Yelp of extremely negative restaurant reviews. These reviews almost exclusively detail the terrible things that happened to his wife at any number of previously highly regarded well-reviewed places.
The idea is that restaurants should take people’s stated food allergies much more seriously. I take my own allergies not seriously enough because Dylan usually makes such dramatic cases for them that I offset his drama with my balancingly opposite demeanour of don’t please worry too much about these things and it’s all good and fine and it’s no very big deal. But clearly they should worry and so should I because it is actually a very big deal.
Because I motherfucking goddamned never want to experience again the remorseless awfulness of what I experienced yesterday. Perhaps Dylan’s dramatics and the public scenes he causes really is the way forward. Sometimes it’s important to take shit seriously and to make sure that others take shit seriously too.
The good thing is the terror and horror of the circumstances has cured me irrevocably of what lingering unhappiness I felt about no longer getting to eat things like eggs. The last thing I ever want to do is eat an egg if that’s what eating eggs does to me. Other people can eat eggs all the days long forever in all the various excellent ways an egg can be eaten. I will no longer feel wistfulness at not getting to take part. Spending nearly an hour slumped over a toilet lost in an endless and terrifying abyss of my own vomit and poo is not the nicest most attractive way to spend one’s time. In fact it’s downright gruesome. So gruesome I feel badly for all of you to make you learn of it by reading this tale of caution and woe and thereby forcing you to deal. The horror, the horror. Apocalypse then, apocalypse never again.
