Some of my more regular readers I’m sure have realized that my posting has dwindled in frequency over the last few weeks and actually down to nothing this week. Part of that is because Tamara was in town and we were just busy doing fun stuff and I didn’t get around to posting as much as I usually do. But this weekend I got a nasty case of food poisoning.

Food poisoning does indeed suck ass and for the first 24 hours of the illness my family seemed to think I was going to wind up in the hospital, however I managed to avoid that. I will spare everyone the gross details and suffice it to say, today (which is day four) although I’m not at 100% my body seems to be functioning more or less within normal parameters again. Yay for solid BM’s!!!

What appears to be the cause of all of this is an improperly washed bowl. You see I have this one big plastic bowl for eating kosher chicken on the occasions that I do treat myself to such food. I keep a kosher kitchen so I don’t mix my meat and dairy at all and actually only by pre-cooked chicken which I don’t heat up or refrigerate as not to have any cross-contamination accidents (no pun intended). Basically sometimes on Friday afternoon I’ll go and buy a pre-cooked chicken and I’ll eat it cold that evening out of my one chicken bowl.

Interestingly enough it wasn’t the chicken that actually got me rather it was my crappy dishwashing job. You see the chicken was purchased and eaten almost 3 weeks ago without incident. Roasted chickens of course are greasy and I just didn’t do a good enough job washing the bowl that I used before putting it away. So basically chicken germs had about two weeks to hang out in my bowl and do whatever it is they do. So last Shabbos I grab my bowl which I also use for salad (salad is Parve after all) and although I noticed a slight filmy grease on, it I opted to use the bowl without cleaning it. Later that evening I started to feel a little bit off so I went to bed early but awoke at 2:30 AM convulsing with the shivers. In fact so much so that the next morning every centimeter of my body ached like I had run a marathon.

It was an absolutely awful experience, to the point that I’ve decided to go off meat completely and back into the world of vegetarianism, which is a lifestyle I’ve been engaged in on and off most of my adult life anyhow. In general I don’t think eating animals is a very healthy thing and the chicken was something I often referred to as my crack habit. I am not suggesting that others shouldn’t eat chicken if they want to just that personally for a long time I’ve had ethical issues with it although over the last year and a half I’ve been turning a blind eye.

On the one hand I think it’s kind of lame that it took me going through this atrocious bout of food poisoning, in order for me to do what I “think is the right thing to do” but if that’s what it takes then I guess that’s what it takes.

The other cool thing about this experience is that although Tamara had just flown back home she was ready to hop right back on a plane fly across the continent again to Ottawa if I was going to be in the hospital. Of course my first thought to that is no you can’t do that we don’t have the money etc. etc. but the bottom line is as she put it ” if you had been admitted to the hospital, you would not have a choice, I would have been coming up”.

Now although I don’t really like “not having a choice” I must admit it’s nice to know that I have someone in my life who cares about me. Someone who cares about me so much that the first thought that crosses her mind when I’m sick is not about finance or the burden this places upon her, rather how quickly can she get here. What can say other than it’s nice to realize that I have someone like that in my life and I am very lucky.

So that’s about it for this update but if I keep feeling better I’m sure to do some more posting this week.

Be well

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