Thursday 2/1: Head home from work early. Spend day suffering from a condition often described using the adjective "explosive."
Thursday night: Add adjective "bloody" to relevant phrase. Right: Strict liquid diet. Add "regurgitation" to Experience section of résumé, but add nothing to toilet bowl thereby. Add "doctor visit" to to-do list.
Friday morning: Sick day. Doctor offers preliminary diagnosis of pseudomembranous colitis, which I guess makes sense, maybe, a little, because I've just come off of antibiotics for the cat bite and even though it's an improbable infection it would be one of the ones the meds wouldn't touch. Doctor prescribes battery of tests, all involving stool samples.
Friday evening: Oh, wait. Tests? What we have here is a failure to excrete. My body decided Thursday to go on a shooting spree, started firing wildly, and so come crunch time I'm completely out of ammunition. In desperation, I break liquid diet to eat a can of beans. Mmm, fiber.
Very early Saturday: Deliver stool samples to hospital. I don't normally time my gastronomical intake-to-outflow speed, but I think that's the Guinness records people on line two.
Saturday: Cancel the Toon game. While there is plenty of humor in my situation, I'm on day 2.5 of the Gatorade fast and in no shape to communicate said humor to the players.
Sunday: Feeling (financially) poor enough to stagger to work and double over in an office chair for eight hours instead of staying home and doubling over on the couch. Tentatively eat some BRATs. Decide to start self-medicating and buy some wildly expensive probiotics that still seem cheap compared to cefuroxime. Discover PmC and giardiasis share a common cure, which would just be a quiet irony if it weren't for me still having half a bottle of metronidazole on hand. Justify using it on the basis that doc offered to get me on meds on Friday and I declined -- then expecting to have test results by Saturday morning.
Monday morning: After constipation so vicious that half my family tree has staggered off to drink prune juice, I examine pencil-sized stools and proceed to disregard the first rule of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Doctor tells me that, no, Bax is not dying, you dimwit; no matter what it says on the Internet, fecal impaction takes weeks to develop. I may, however, have an intestinal condition often described using the adjective "occult" and need to follow up with him in a week to make sure Bax really won't die.
Monday: Arrive late to both jobs due to ripple effect from doctor visit. End up standing up and running around for the majority of the afternoon due to covering for a cashier that called in sick. Strike back in my own clever way: Call home and whimper about it. Survive a nearly 16-hour day ... somehow.
Tuesday: I find out the results of the C-Diff test: negative. In other news, there is a medical test known as a "C-Diff." This cheers me up immensely. I can now add to my résumé that my hack-fu is so strong I have cdiff'ed my FPU.* I spend the day mentally writing the cdiff man page and wondering whether 'c' should stand for "color," "category," or "context." Context wins.
Tuesday night: Feeling well enough to head to Go night with
roaminrob; I claw to a 34-32 win (6-stone handicap) in the one game I play. I am justly proud of this; I actually won by catching my more-experienced opponent's mistake. In other news, dammit ... DAMMIT! The negative cdiff (Error: No response from output device) means PmC is off the culprit list. The metronidazole, it does nothing!Wednesday: Mercifully feeling much better. Procrastinate on updating LJ in favor of finishing the final secret level of "Cave Story." So now you can probably guess what I was doing last weekend while sick.
Thursday: Still not dead. Eat dinner with a man who has interviewed the Dalai Lama. Stand under stage lights to audience applause while being paid for tech support. Umm ... wait. When was Rabbit Hole day again?
Friday: See Saturday.
Saturday: I meant this Saturday, not the previous one. Dammit ... I hope I didn't just throw my entire readership into an infinite loop.
Saturday evening: No medical news. On the other hand, Toon game was loads of fun. And the word "colon" was used one fewer time than the phrase "Great, now the laser has a weapon." ]B=8D
Sunday: The remaining test results (for several strains of food poisoning) arrive, a mere 168 hours of processing later. Go modern medicine! And they're all negative. Meaning that apparently there was never anything wrong with my colon in the first place.
Well, shit. If I'd known that I'd have ordered the sushi.
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* Food Processing Unit, natch.