How NOT to spend a birthday week: purging yourself for roughly five days of literally gut-wrenching illness, the likes of which I have never endured before. This was Gutpocalypse, a sickness of awesome proportions that finally seems to have passed through my system as of yesterday... only to pass on - in a thankfully-lessened state - to Damiana's. At least we now have a pile of medications and some idea of what to expect. This past week, however, was terra incognita for us both. And if I never see such territory again, it will be far too soon.
Was it a virus? Bacteria? I suspect it was a perfect storm of both. Although I had originally tagged it as the norovirus earlier this week, certain characteristics of Gutpocalypse - aka Godzilla - matched food poisoning rather than viral infection. Checking through possible vectors yesterday, we figured out that I had opportunities to be exposed to both ailments, yet people around me didn't seem to be affected nearly as badly as I was, if at all. The illness, too, transcended anything I've ever experienced before. I've had food poisoning, stomach flus, intestinal bugs and such before, but this... this monstrosity reared its head (or headed for my... oh, never mind...) in ways that dwarfed all previous comprehension.
Gutzilla appeared on the horizon like the echoing thunder-steps heard in the original film Gorjila (*): deep, resonant harbingers that could easily have been mistaken for something more innocuous. My appetite, usually hearty, had disappeared Monday morning. I chalked it up to deep work-focus, as Ravens in the Library had gone to layout and was in its first proof stage. By afternoon, when I left to go to Bryan's place to game, I realized I'd eaten a single bowl of cerial, two pieces of toast and a few cups of chai. Ravenous, I tore into the pizzas we'd purchased as game-munchies, then lapsed into a headache I attributed to over-reading, under-eating and over-stuffing. Upon my return home, I crashed hard and fast. That night, Dami suffered bursts of acid reflux that sent her coughing and vomiting for hours. I was so bleared out that I missed most of that. ">
Gutzilla appeared on the horizon like the echoing thunder-steps heard in the original film Gorjila (*): deep, resonant harbingers that could easily have been mistaken for something more innocuous. My appetite, usually hearty, had disappeared Monday morning. I chalked it up to deep work-focus, as Ravens in the Library had gone to layout and was in its first proof stage. By afternoon, when I left to go to Bryan's place to game, I realized I'd eaten a single bowl of ceriel, two pieces of toast and a few cups of chai. Ravenous, I tore into the pizzas we'd purchased as game-munchies, then lapsed into a headache I attributed to over-reading, under-eating and over-stuffing. Upon my return home, I crashed hard and fast. That night, Dami suffered bursts of acid reflux that sent her coughing and vomiting for hours. I was so bleared out that I missed most of that.
The Beast appeared Tusday afternoon, where a sluggish birthday turned ugly by about 3:00 PM. After eating a tuna-and-avacado sandwich, I felt queasy and vertiginous. By the time Dami got back from work, I was shaking and chilled. We decided to forgo a birthday dinner in favor of snuggles, but surges of vomiting and other unpleasantries sent me diving for the bathroom. Shortly afterward, I began shivering uncontrollably. I stood up to hit the bathroom - and my legs gave out. Dami helped me to the bathroom, which which I was to become my frequent residence for the rest of the week. I called my boss around 8:00 PM to let him know I would be unable to teach Wednesday morning's class. Fortunately, that class was to have been a full-period exam, so I sent the exam files to him and went to bed. Even wrapped in layers of clothing, blasted by a space-heater and warmed by Dami and our Pumpkin (also nicknamed "Medicine Kitty" for her propensity to lie purring on people who are sick), I shivered uncontrollably all night, leaving the bed long enough to void myself further, clean up, and repeat the process. I got some idea of just how sick I'd become when at one point that night I tried to open a bottle of Sobe energy drink and literally couldn't break the seal. That weakness, in some ways, scared me even more than the illness itself.
Wednesday dawned, and I felt slightly better. As I'd posted here, the (I thought...) aftermath of Gutzilla's rampage left me drained and sore. I tried to concentrate on the next round of Ravens proofs, but felt unable to focus. An attempt to eat toast ended with a few restless bites of something that smelled ashy and tasted worse. A cycle of naps had me feeling better - deceptively so. How little I understood...
Wednesday night, the Gutpocalpyse broke full-force. Like the 500-foot radioactive horror that torched Tokyo, like the chalices poured out upon the earth by vast and wrathful angels, pain and misery outside my spectrum of previous experience descended. Now, I've been stabbed, burned, tear-gassed, operated upon and cut by a chainsaw; I've had bones broken and fillings drilled and wisdom teeth removed and so when I say that nothing has ever hurt me like the surges of excruciation that hit Wednesday night, that's no small thing to describe. Thankfully, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chinchillagirl had vacated our sick-ward apartment by then, wisely deciding she didn't want to get infected. I'm glad she did. Shortly after dusk, the periodic discomfort that had ebbed and flowed all day turned into a tsunami of gastrointestinal horrors. Worst of all, however, was the pain as my GI tract simultaniously bloated, purged and tied itself in knots trying to dislodge whatever the hell was wrong with it. Anything I took was voided within minutes; anything I tried to use for relief proved ueselss. Medication, meditation, yoga, hot baths, heat pads... the worst part of all of it was my sheer helplessness. Well, that plus an intestinal tract with delusions of becoming a black hole of hypercompounded gravity physics, but you get the general idea. Poor Dami held me, watched over me and - at one point - drove out to find some medicine for me at 2:00 AM or so. Finally, we managed to drift off and get something resembling sleep.
Thursday, I was starting to get pissed. By this time, I was days behind on the Ravens proof, hadn't eaten solid food in days, had a belly swollen to trailer trash proportions, and was spending more time either asleep or in the bathroom than I was getting work done. Anger is a great motivator. A combination of stubbornness, periodic sleep and the sheer enthusiasm of reading Ravens cover-to-cover in an all-but-final form got me through another day of cramping, bloating and pain. As I told Dami that night, I'm not sure how much of that was due simply to getting used to the sickness and how much involved getting mad at it, but Thursday - though miserable - was considerably better than Wednesday had been.
By Friday, everything that had gone in had come back out. In an odd Zen sort of way, that brought a sense of serenity to the proceedings. It was payday, so we originally thought to perhaps go to an Urgent Care facility and blow whatever cash it took to finally make this damned thing go away. Instead, Dami brought her formidable Mama lore to bear, and returned from a long shopping trip with apple sauce, Gatorade, crackers, and bottles of medicines and herbs, including Valerian.(**) I took them by the handful, and dozed. When I woke, I felt distinctly better. As Friday is our date night, we settled in to watch The Protector when a funny thing happened: I noticed that I'd acquired an appetite. For the previous few days, the mere sight of food labels had made me nauseous; when Dami had cooked food for herself, it'd smelt burnt and sour to me(***), and nothing I ate tasted in any way appealing. Friday evening, though, I ate some apple sauce, nibbled and some crackers... and nothing happened! No run to the bathroom, no cramps, no boiling gut-bubbles surging through me - nothing! We enjoyed the movie, rested, then watched Clerks also and went to bed at a reasonable hour. Having finally finished Ravens, I was able to sleep the night through for the first time since Monday.
Which brings us to yesterday, when I woke up feeling like my old self again - worn-out, sore and drained, but otherwise healthy. Together, we cleaned the apartment thoroughly, ate a small but healthy brunch, went out shopping, planned to go see Coraline, and speculated about what Gutzilla's pedigree might have been.
Y'see, Gutzilla's Gutpocalyse shared elements of the norovirus, food poisoning, and various other gastrointestinal ailments we'd investigated. I'd had the opportunity to be exposed to several potential causes - Dami's Monday-night sickness, food poisoning via pizza or tuna sandwich, viruses on the bus or at gaming itself - but no one else around me (with the exception of one dude in our gaming group, who I think may have been a vector) appeared to get sick from any one of them.. and certainly not as sick. Eventually, we figured that I'd been hit by several things all at once, with the severity of the illness compounded by that abdominal collision. And so, we went off to run some errands...
...Whereupon Dami began to get sick.
So we came home, put her to bed, dosed her with meds, and started watching the signs.
Thankfully, she doesn't seem to have met Gutzilla. She certainly isn't well, and this time out I'm taking care of her. Maybe by catching things early and having some idea of what to expect, we can avoid a repeat of this week's worst effects.
For now, though, please send some healing energy to my sweetheart. She has been an INCREDIBLE partner these last few days, and without her (and Medicine Kitty), I don't even want to think of how much worse the Gutpocalypse might have been...
Thank you, Belovedest, and be well!
And as for you, Gutzilla - hie thee hence! Go infest a gathering of Republican insurance CEOs or something, and leave honest hard-working folk alone!
* - Anyone who has seen this film in its original, Japanese-language non-Raymond-Burricized version knows that Gorjila is no kiddy film. It's a horror movie of the sort that only a nation that has been bombed and nuked to ashes could have conceived. Scenes cut from the Americanized Godzilla: King of the Monsters include people cooked to ashes by Gorjila's breath, screaming children with radiation burns, long panoramas of a burning Tokyo, and a woman comforting her sobbing kids with, "It's okay - we'll be with papa soon" just before they're vaporized by the beast's atomic breath. When I saw the real Gorjila in a theatre during its stateside release in 2004, the theatre was dead-shocked silent at the scenes of burning rubble and radiation carnage. Before its famous re-incarnation as Godzilla:KotM, Gorjila was a coping mechanism for a nation that had both inflicted and endured some of the greatest horrors in human memory. That fact has nothing to do with my stomach illness, but it's interesting anyway.
** - Old Mage fans ought to be amused by that one!
*** - Commonly a symptom of food poisoning rather than viral infection.
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