Feel it in your guts

Ah, I remember really smugly telling an older couple with whom we enjoyed an AMAZING dinner at ATOL, that we hadn’t experienced any stomach illness since embarking on our journey. I then immediately and quite literally ‘ate’ my words…By getting food poisoning so severe I thought I might die or at least have to lay myself at the mercy of Ian, and maybe a Mazatlán hospital.

Honestly Ian and I are not the sensitive stomach types, basically ever. It is quite rare that we are laid so low. So, what was the culprit?

As it turns out, that’s a game you play endlessly when you’re sick. All you do, in between bouts of extreme vomiting and oh the other thing…

It happened pretty suddenly – one minute we were enjoying the Mazatlán aquarium (kind of shabby but fun, though we did feel bad for the sea turtles who clearly had an enclosure that was small for them. Also a few of them were missing arms, so they could not be returned to the ocean. I called them all ‘Stumpy’). Then I experienced extreme bloating and fatigue, which is not uncommon for me. Unfortunately I have a chronic disease that flares up despite trying to manage it with medication and the fatigue/bloating is so extreme that I have trouble breathing because it presses against my ribs is common. Thinking it was a run of the mill weeklong flare-up, I took some Aleve and we went to the grocery store.

I made a salad for lunch using disinfected veggies and this unique sour cheese we had bought at the grocery store a few days prior and while I was eating it, I had this distinct ‘I am having trouble finishing this and I am not sure why’ feeling. As it turns out, TRUST THIS FEELING. Oh man.

I forced down the rest of the salad, feeling more bloated and worse and worse. I took another Aleve and it went down like acid, searing my esophagus and the bloating intensified. My stomach felt like someone was stretching a balloon of acid and pain and I suddenly had crazy nausea.

I writhed around for awhile feeling miserable until I puked multiple times, which absolutely did not relieve the nausea or extreme bloating.

And that, friends, was the next 48 hours of my life, interspersed by muscle weakness and diarrhea so intense I actually almost didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Thankfully there was a washer/dryer in the unit we rented.

It was so horrendous at night (a night I wasn’t sleeping anyways, since locals were celebrating a Saint-Virgin-whatever by exploding M-83s all night) that I fainted, missing the light switch and calling weakly to Ian as I collapsed on the cooling tile floor, pouring sweat. Ian said he couldn’t turn on the A/C because it was broken and I snapped that I WAS FREEZING anyways, while sweating so profusely I soaked through my sleep clothes and it was beading on my forehead.

It took a good few days to want to eat again, and to make sure whatever I ate stayed firmly inside my stomach, where it belonged. And then Ian immediately got sick but his illness cycled through much faster than mine, I observed with some jealousy and some relief.

After that, we reviewed our food and it was clear: the cheese was tainted.

The fun side of that was that a lot of whatever else we ate also seemed, in our minds, tainted beyond recognition even if they were not the cause. Ian doesn’t want papaya anymore, or chili and I don’t want baked goods at all.

Fun times! It’s just such a shame that our stay in Mazatlán was tainted (literally) by this experience with bad cheese. It could be such a fun place, a fun experience and we fled it, seeking to escape the stench of overwhelming sickness. Blah!

[Cover Photo Credit: Hey Paul Studios]