Rancid

Hi!
I'm stupid and I like to give myself botulism!

Well, it wasn't really botulism. But it was nasty. See, what happened was I cooked a little stew of about 7 kinds of mushrooms, shrimp, and egg for breakfast on Monday morning. I ate it with rice and it was quite delicious. In my hurry to leave for work, I didn't stick it in the fridge. When I got home from work I did, but I plucked about 4 shrimp and a few shrooms out and ate them as I was pouring the concoction into tupperware. A couple hours later my stomach started feeling really strange. I fell asleep for about a half hour and then woke up and realized I was going to puke. So I did. A lot. For a few hours.

Doubled over and googling "food poisoning" on the internet, I noticed how many times seafood and mushrooms were mentioned as reasons to visit the hospital. So I did. For a few hours.

The doctor who was summoned to see me in the ER was half asleep, but at least he could speak English quite well. While they were sticking tubes in me and injecting needles in my ass and taking blood out of me, I was busy throwing up and moaning.

A couple hours after I arrived in the ER they brought another fellow in. It looked like he'd had some accident at work, as he was wearing a uniform and was carried in by other guys wearing the same uniform. His foot was all wrapped up and when the doctors removed the makeshift bandages the top part of the guy's big toe was missing and he had a huge deep gash down the center of it. Blood was leaking out. Because it seemed both necessary and appropriate, I threw up in a plastic bag the nurse had given me.

They worked on that guy for awhile before wrapping him up and wheeling him next to me. We immediately bonded and formed a band we named "MOAN" and hashed out what will be our 1st single, a little acapella ditty called "Good Christ Dis Shit Be Hurtin'!"

I got X-Rays done, and the doctors looked at them for quite awhile. My IV ran out and when I finally noticed it, my blood had seeped half way back up the line. A guy who I assumed was a surgeon came down to look at MOAN-member's toe, and they took him behind a curtain to the other side of the room for a long time and he got really quiet. I was worried they had killed him, but he finally emerged all asleep, so I guess they had just sedated him.

The staff changed all the peppermint candy sheets on the gurneys and mopped the floor, readying the ER for a new day of trauma. Every time I got off my bed to walk myself and my IV down the hall to violently dry heave awhile in the bathroom, though, I noticed spots of caked-on blood on the fresh-changed sheets on the bed beside mine.

My boss turned up and waited in the lobby while I waited for my blood work. Finally, it was time to go home, the tests were normal and x-rays ok and it was concluded that it was probably indeed the shrimp. At least the fine folks at the hospital actually did some tests to try to rule out more serious ailments than food poisoning. My regular doctor just uses his dolphin-sonar in his forehead to see what's wrong with me, and then orders up a good 'ole ass-injection.

Work Tuesday was floaty and surreal, and I rocked out a temperature over 102 all day long, which is aggravated by the mugginess at work. You know that flip out scene Shirley MacLaine has at the nurses station when her dying daughter isn't given her pain medication in a timely manner? That's the scene I'm about to re-enact if my boss doesn't get the fans up in the classrooms. The teacher's room is the worst, as there are no windows. By the end of the day it's filled with everyone's hot breath and it feels like a sauna.

"It's almost June and there's no FANS! I'm supposed to have AIR! Why isn't there any air? Give me the FANS. GIVE ME THE FAAANNNNNSSSS!"

I'm certainly out of the weeds now, but I'm still running super hot and chilly cold.

Please refrigerate your food after cooking it so as to avoid bacterial contamination. This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the duo "MOAN." Check out their debut album "Owwwwww," in stores soon!