Salmonellosis 4

This is the latest in a series of posts on my experience with Salmonella that starts here.

The Doctor told me that the next step would involve me using a special toilet. Actually, it was more like a small storage container that fit over the bowl of the toilet that I would poop in. He explained that I would make a deuce in the apparatus and use a small scoop to transfer the feces into a tube for testing. It sounded kind of gross, but simple enough. At this point I was willing to try anything to figure out what was wrong with me.

I went into the bathroom after being scowled at by a receptionist for asking for a “special magazine.” I don’t think she appreciated my sense of humor. I was given the bowl and was told that I would find the tube and spoon in a little door to the right of the seat. I dropped trou and took a seat on the stool. Hmmm, I racked my brain trying to come up with a better stool joke, but what actually happened I think will be more entertaining so I will move on.

I opened the door and found the supplies. There were two tubes and I would have to get some in both of them. As I’ve mentioned before, I was not able to produce much more than a tablespoon at a time during this sickness. I got out what I could, and stood up and retrieved the dish. I sat back down and prepared myself for the task at hand. I opened up one tube and grabbed the little spoon. When I say little, I mean this thing was tiny. I jabbed at the mucus-like feces and tried to pick it up. It slid off. I tried again, this time from another angle, and I got it up about an inch before my hand started trembling and it flopped down again. I imagined myself in the little electric vehicles in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex was coming. Every time I thought I had it, the giant dinosaur would take a step and everything would jiggle and fall down.

I don’t know if I was shaking and sweating from alcohol withdrawal or from severe desiccation or both, but I became agitated, frustrated, and I thought I was going to lose my mind in that little room. I used a common profanity that rhymes with fuck and I came up with a plan. I would make a simple funnel out of the paperwork that I had signed for all of the services I’d received so far. I had only one shot at making it into two small glass tubes. I rolled it up, made a crease so I could stop the flow, and I dumped in the poop. It worked. It fucking worked! I was so proud of myself I could have shit, if I could have shit.

I cleaned up and put everything in the little door for analysis. I would be given four more tubes to bring home to fill up later. That was the end of the day at the hospital. I had told them from the get-go that I had no insurance so we should only do what was absolutely necessary for diagnosis which is why I was not admitted overnight or until an official diagnosis was given.

The next day was Thanksgiving and I spent most of it alone. My awesome friends Curt and Sara brought me a turkey dinner which was more than I had eaten in over a week. I really wanted a beer but they would not let me have one. It’s good to have friends. The day after that, I had filled my tubes with feces and my even better friend offered to bring a paper bag full of my samples to the clinic a few miles away to be analyzed. I was really grateful for that and all of the support they gave me while I was sick.

The day after that, I started feeling better. I mean all of the crippling pain was just gone when I woke up and I made something very special in my toilet that had been building up for weeks. Then the Doctor called me and informed me that I had Salmonella and there wasn’t anything they could really do about it. I nodded, I don’t think he heard me.

I spent the next few days answering questions from the Department of Health because I worked in a restaurant, but we eventually determined that I got sick from the shitty goat that I just had to pet. Lesson learned.

Salmonellosis 3

In April of 2001 I experienced the single most traumatic event of my lifetime until that point. I entered Hazrlden and they required a blood draw.

When I went into the hospital 13 years later because I thought I might be dying, the Doctor told me the same thing. Immediately I felt like running. I'm not afraid of needles, I'm afraid of having blood drawn, or getting/having/or even hearing about surgery. (Just now I wanted to find out the proper name for those phobias, and I gave up in about three seconds because of all the danger words I saw as a result of my search.) I knew I went pale, and I remember walking away from the Doctor with a sheet of paper in my hand for the evil blood people, and I found Curt and we went to the proper floor. Waiting in the lobby was terrifying. I knew that at any moment they could call my name and I wasn't sure if I could stand up without passing out. I'm up in my head a lot and when I start thinking about all of the possibilities.....

Anyhow, my name was called and I shyly stood and admitted I was the chosen one. She told me I looked nervous and I'm sure I told her something very nice about her ability to observe and mention things. I could see the chair through tunnel vision as I made my approach and I felt the urge to vomit. I didn't, and I sat. The mean woman went about her routine like I was some normal customer and I made her aware of my fear. She didn't slow down. "Can't we talk about this?" I pleaded. She was in no mood. Bitch.

She produced an alcohol wipe and rubbed it vigorously against my arm in the bad place that bad people shouldn't touch. That was enough to make me see stars. I couldn't breathe, so I couldn't tell her to stop. Black. Quiet. Safety.


I woke up to being attacked by three women. Two were holding me down and one was stabbing me repeatedly in the lower armpit (I don't know if there's a term for the other side of the elbow). They were saying things  but I couldn't understand them. They may have been taunting me.

Suddenly, all of my senses came flooding back. I could feel the needle leaving as my hearing and sight started to aid my brain again. The nurse said  "It looks like your color is coming back." Thanks

It was over. For the first time in 10 days, something took my mind off of the pain I felt. What a world.

Twenty minutes later the Doc called me in to tell me that all of my blood appeared to be normal. I was literally pissed that I had to go through all of that for nothing. He then told me about the next test we would do. I listened. I remained calm. "What?"

Salmonellosis 2

Even with the pains and unbalanced diet I put myself on as a result of what I didn’t yet know was Salmonella, I decided it was OK to go on a little drinking bender in a remote hunting shack somewhere outside of Lanesboro. As I mentioned at the end of the last post, this shack had no toilet. It was a trailer surrounded by grass, surrounded by taller grass, and eventually dense forest and vegetation. It was winter time but the snow had not yet fallen.  It is beautiful down in southeast Minnesota, and this location was no exception.

For the first few days of the illness, I had been crawling to the bathroom in my apartment 20-30 times per day. As I restricted my food intake, the trips became less frequent. By the sixth or seventh day I was able to venture outside of my apartment without fear of shitting in my pants. Mind you I had not been to see a Doctor yet because I thought whatever I had would simply run its course, which would turn out to be true after a $2,000 bill. Anyhow, it was deer hunting season and I had already purchased my license so I was going to go.

We got to the shack and proceeded to drink at our normal pace which was quite heavy. Definitely beer, maybe Jägermeister, and definitely beer. (It seems to never fail. I’m sitting at Nina’s enjoying a cup of amazing coffee, and the creepiest fucking guy with a cartoon fat face and a terrible cough sits right next to me. He’s wearing more cologne than I own, and his mouth is hanging open. It’s 6:58am and we’re the only two people in here.) I held my poops pretty well that night. When I woke up at 4 to get ready, the urge hit and I stepped outside.

The following is the story of the worst single shit I have ever had in my life. I was wearing coveralls and they needed to come all the way off in order for them to not get covered in feces. It was coming out like right now and that’s when I forgot how to use a zipper. The struggle was real, I felt like I was in one of those horrible Japanese game shows where you try to hold in your mud for as long as possible. It was below zero outside and I was sweating. I was also swearing, mad for being so foolish as to leave myself out in the middle of nowhere without the basic necessities. Finally, the zipper worked and I jumped out of the coveralls and I sat over the top of a giant sideways log. I remember how sharp the frozen bark felt on my bare ass as I tried to find a position in which my poop would hit the ground, and I wouldn’t crush my testicles and pee on my leg. I sat, and I pushed. That was the worst part about the whole sickness. Not so much the terrible cramping, but the feeling of horrible gas bubbles that wouldn’t go away for days. I mean, it always felt like I had to go but I couldn’t, even after I had. I felt a movement. Then, it happened. I heard a pop followed by a muffled, guttural splash of hot jelly hitting frozen dead grass, I did not miss the log. I let out a laugh/sigh of relief, and just sat there. I was so cold, but the thought that I could maybe just push out a little more kept me in that awkward state for a few more minutes. There would be no more poop, and there would be no deer. And most importantly there was no toilet paper. Fuck.

It was the day before Thanksgiving when my friend Curt took me to the hospital in Rochester. I thought I had entered the E.R. at Olmsted Medical Center, but I had actually entered the clinic. I didn’t care. I went up to the receptionist and said, “I think I’m dying.” She looked me over and decided I was serious and called for help. Within minutes I had a Doctor in front of me and we went over the standard questions. I only remember hearing one thing from that whole conversation, "...we will need to take a sample of your blood.” Fuck.

Salmonellosis 1

According to the C.D.C. Salmonella causes one million foodborne illnesses in the United States, with 19,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths every year. I was part of the one million, but I thought for sure I was a 380. In fact, I did go to the hospital after an eight-day battle with an unknown sickness, but by the time the Doctor called me with a diagnosis a week later, it had run its course.

I had plans to help Sara load hay bales onto a trailer for her horses to eat. I was not allowed to eat the hay, but I did and it didn’t taste very good. That’s not how I contracted the disease. It was far more sinister.

So there was a shit-covered goat, or maybe a lamb, in a pasture. I mean this thing looked like it was dying because it probably was. I thought it looked cute so I decided I should pet it. I like animals, even ones that are covered in feces and some sort of slime. Needless to say, I went about the task without washing my hands, and at some point something entered my mouth, and inevitably my insides. I had no clue what I was in for.

The following morning, I woke up at Sara’s house and I had to run to the toilet. Diarrhea exploded from my backside, and vomit from my front. Either my butt or my mouth was in a trash can or a toilet, I cannot be certain in which order. I would long for the days of diarrhea after that, as I was not able to produce a B.M. for the following ten days.

I was driven home where I had one more day off of work, and I thought I would recover from yet another bout of alcohol poisoning. What I found strange was a pain in my guts that seemed to come and go in waves. Roughly every ten minutes a wave would crash down and I would roll around on the floor in agony. I would then crawl to the bathroom where I would sit on the toilet and produce a teaspoon of transparent gelatinous feces. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, or how long I waited, nothing more would come out. I decided to go on the standard flu diet of ramen and Gatorade. What I didn’t know until recently is that you should try to maintain a normal diet if you have Salmonella because it helps push it through your system. What I was doing was very dangerous, and in the end I lost a lot of weight and became slightly delusional from severe dehydration. This is exactly how people die.

For the first time in my working career, I called into work with the very real excuse of being sick. Day after day I called and gave the same story-- couldn’t walk, I couldn’t poop, and I wanted to die.

There’s another problem I’ve mentioned several hundred times in the course of my writing, I was having some troubles not drinking alcohol. At this stage in my life I relied heavily on beer to get me through my day to day life. My body or maybe my brain noticed the difference immediately and told me I needed to drink soon or I would continue shaking and sweating, I was torn by my need to survive, and my need to sustain. I drank a beer, and it was enough to stop the tremors. 

Somewhere around day three, I informed my friends of my condition and they came over in shifts to help me live. For the most part that just meant sitting and talking to me. Smoking weed helped my appetite but I was still afraid to eat because I was under the impression that I wouldn’t be able to process things and I would have tremendous difficulty passing them. But I still wasn’t willing to go to a Doctor.

This was an important time of year for the friends group of friends. This was hunting season and Thanksgiving, both of which I was sick through. I made an attempt at hunting one morning. The plan was to go to Sara’s family hunting shack to sleep, and get up early to hunt. There was one problem I discovered upon entering that would make things a little difficult for me, there was no toilet…

To be continued.