.....The sickest I've ever been (and believe me, I've been very sick on many occasions, not even including the several times I was declared "brain dead" by my unsympathetic wife when I sobbed and cried and complained of pains all over for days following the Canucks' missing the play-offs), was last February after a trip to New York City, when I got home to several phone interviews that I had to do, and as always when I'm talking a lot and not thinking much (yes, there are times I actually do think while talking, although admittedly, it's not often enough), I kept going back to the fridge to nibble on some hummus that I had purchased before we left on our trip, but which, to my hungry eyes, looked and smelled fine (well, OK, it did taste a wee bit off, but hey, I was hungry, so I ignored that taste).
.....Well, that night, I started retching; and retching; and retching, and that terrible nausea-cum-vomiting-cum-"please-God-let-me-die-right-nowF-feeling went on for over 18 hours, when it mercifully started to pass, but in the interim I felt so bad that I even asked the locum replacing my family doctor to admit me to hospital, a tactic the young dude |
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diplomatically refused, although I swear I could hear him laughing to his staff about that "total moron," yet another sure sign that young doctors these days have very little respect for their wise elders.
.....The diarrhea hit the next day, of course, and it took me over 2 weeks to feel significantly better, 2 weeks during which I felt terribly sorry for myself and during which my "Nurse Phyllis" wife laughed herself to bed every night, |
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but I consoled myself somewhat with the observation that I had at least learned a terrible though valuable lesson: no more 2 week-old hummus for me.
.....Actually, the lesson I learned is much bigger: what occurred to me in between spasms was that 1) my will was not up-to-date, and 2) food (and drink) safety is a health issue that only gets media, and hence public, attention when some "food scare" periodically bursts into the news (bisphenol A or BPA, melamine, listeriosis, and so on), and then for a while, no one, it seems, can stop worrying about that specific "crisis" and about how it will affect them (as an aside, this worry is nearly always a very misplaced anxiety by which I mean that the typical overly-sedentary, overweight, poor-eating Canadian is way, way, way more likely to be adversely affected by his poor lifestyle choices than by his choice of drinking container).
.....Yet, even when no food scares are circulating in the news, which is most of the time, of course, the safety (or lack of it) of what we eat or drink every day is in fact a huge medical issue, a problem that |
