Monday, December 01, 2008

Coming back out the wrong way

Well.... that was fun.

I made the brilliant move of not eating anything all day but coffee and doughnuts this morning (or rather yesterday morning, since it's about 1am now), then going to help my mother move all day.

By the time I got home it was 9 o'clock already, and I was starving so I just grabbed some Burger King; my "usual" big meal from BK (if once a month can be considered "usual", a plain chicken sandwhich and a bacon double cheeseburger.

Well, the burger tasted a little weird, but I didn't think much of it at the time; and I finished it.

Mistake on my part.

I was fine for a couple hours... basically until just after I finished the last post. Or rather, the food didn't sit well with me from when I ate it, but it didn't seem serious; more like the normal indigestion you'd get after having a large meal after several hours of vigorous excercise on an empty stomach, plus a bit of a headache.

Then, all of a sudden, I started feeling very nauseous, and I started getting red blotches all over. I spent the last almost two hours puking my guts out, with great force and vigor.

I would say it would be fair to characterize the vomiting as "projectile".

God I hate puking.

It's not a standard "food poisoning" as such, because it happened too quickly after ingestion. I suppose it could be a bacterial toxin... a possibility strengthened by the secondary symptom of the rash; but it's still unlikely.

The rash, lack of fever, and the rapidity of the reaction suggest I ate something I'm allergic to; though that's a pretty limited list of things, none of which seem likely to have shown up in a Burger King burger.

As far as I know, my allergens are pretty limited. Onions antagonize my ulcerative colitis (not a true allergy), I'm allergic to certain fungi and substances derived from them (but not table mushrooms), I get amoxicillin rash (not a true allergy); and I'm not allergic to shellfish (I eat shrimp, lobster, clams, and scallops all the time, no problem), but I am to the red dye they make from concentrating the pigment from their shells.

Weird.

Anyway, now that it's all out, I feel MUCH better. The rash is going away, I'm not nauseous, and my headache is gone.

I'm going to take some benadryl just in case, and if symptoms return, or I pop a temp, I'll go hit the urgent care; otherwise I may have found a new food allergy.

Update: Well, it's definitely some kind of food poisoning, because just drinking my morning tea triggered it again. An hour after something went into my stomach, and I'm losing it out the wrong way again.

Also, since it's persistent, it's possible that I mistook the incubation period and it was something I ate on Saturday, or even Friday; the funny taste was there because the food poisoning was already on me, and I hadn't noticed it earlier because I hadn't eaten anything.