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mysterious workplace stomach illness
Monday, October 22 2018
I took leftover pasta with me when I went to work today, and at around noon I heated it in the office microwave, added some hot sauce, and ate it. It was good, and there was enough to completely satisfy me. Still wary of the puffballs I'd cooked yesterday, I hadn't brought any.
About an hour later, I started feeling mildly ill in my stomach. And by 2:00pm, I was feeling positively nauseated. Antacids helped keep that pre-puke burning in check, but there was only so much good it could do. I actually wondered for a time if I should tell someone I was sick and go home. Why was I feeling this way? Did I have a "stomach bug" (as my father would've called it)? Or had I had one too many soy curl? Yesterday I hadn't drunk any alcohol or taken any drugs stronger than coffee, so this wasn't any sort of hangover.
Thankfully, by around 4:00pm, I'd begun to recover, and I could focus once again on the task at hand (which today involved testing the interaction of a webapp running in the Electron framework with a dot-matrix receipt printer).
At the end of the day, I was feeling well enough to drive out of my way to the Tibetan Center to look for treasure in their thrift store. The pickings were poor even after weeks of absence; I found a one-to-three-outlet 120 volt plug expander, a cute pair of vintage scissors, and a stack of 1500 watt Faberware space heaters in their original boxes. The woman charged me $15 for the one space heater I selected, which wasn't much cheaper than it would've been at Home Depot. But there it was for a better cause than Home Depot's. And all the space heaters in our house seem to be falling apart at once. (This is the season when space heaters are most useful; after I turn on the boiler they play less of a role until exceptionally bitter cold descends from the north.)
I went to Hurley Ridge Hannaford to buy some things I knew we needed: a bag of onions, some garlic, mushrooms, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, orange juice, and a bottle of Naked mango smoothie. I also got a bag of Ritz-brand pita chips, which seemed like the thing I could eat during the drive home. My stomach wasn't 100%, but crunchy salty food seemed like something it could handle.
Gretchen had gone down to the Upper East Side for the night; she was working as de-cluttering professional organizer for her older friend Wendy (who has been her only decluttering client for over ten years now).
I was now well enough to venture (with the dogs) into the forest with my backpack and a saw. Just south of the Chamomile on the Stick Trail, I was able to buck up a fallen red oak in the murky evening light. It didn't make for an especially heavy load, which was just as well, since this was the greatest distance I'd traveled to retrieve wood this season so far (and, unlike wood from across the Farm Road, homeward was uphill).
After eating some icecream, I figured I'd try drinking a gentle Modelo beer. But clearly something was still wrong with me, because I found it difficult to drink the entire bottle. But after taking a bath, my stomach seemed better, and I was able to drink a small glass of sherry. Perhaps I shouldn't've been drinking any alcohol at all, but my rules don't allow me to drink often, so when they do allow me to drink, damn it, I'll drink at least a little bit.
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