I’m trying a new post a day thing. Where I write a new post every day — though I won’t necessarily post it. I had been going to do this every week day in the time it takes my brain to spin up every morning. Right now that time is largely lost to reading web comics and the news, and my theory is that spending it writing will be better warm up for writing code. Like I said, I had been going to save it for weekdays. But this story wanted for telling.
So the past week has been pretty miserable. It’s been over a year and a half since I really got sick (one bout of food sickness aside). I’ve felt things coming on a couple of times, but have always been able to fight them off. Well, that was when I was living in an oversized house completely alone and largely isolated from other people. I am now living in a house with four other people and two dogs. My exposure level to disease has gone up exponentially. So I caught the flu. Or a cold. I’m not sure which. Slight sore throat, headache, stuffed nose, fever, sneezing, and coughing. What fun. Having to deal with disease again after a year and a half with out has proven some what challenging. I’d forgotten just how hard it can be to ignore having the flu. Just how bad it feels to be exhausted, sneezing and feverish. I spent the week not terribly productive at work, and largely ignoring my chores. My room got to be pretty messy. My laundry was undone, the floor unswept, my bed and blankets smelled like dog and, well, you get the picture. This probably didn’t help me with that whole being sick thing.
In any case, by Thursday and Friday I was done with being sick. Totally and completely fed up with it. I went into high gear health mode. Fortified fruit smoothies and dozen vegetable stone soup. I made a giant pot of the soup (potato, sweet potato, carrot, turnip, beet, beet greens, onion, bella mushrooms, shitake mushrooms, beef chuck and broccoli) and left it simmering on the stove all day. That was pretty much all I ate. Fruit smoothies and tea were essentially all I drank. For two days.
By the end of Friday I was beginning to crave some more substantial food. I had to go pickup my raw milk share at the end of the day and when I got back I had a hankering for dairy. I opened up one of my bottles of fresh from the cow raw milk and chugged a pint. Then another half. Then I put it away. With out even thinking about it I reached into the fridge and pulled out the yogurt and started chowing down on that, too.
Now lets stop and think about this for a second. This is live culture yogurt. I just drank a pint and a half of milk. Which means in my stomach there was currently nearly a quart of fresh, raw milk sitting at a toasty temp of around 98.6 degrees F. Just about the perfect temp for the yogurt bugs. Now normally, yogurt is great for your stomach. The bugs are friendly, they don’t tend to go out of control and they can easily out compete or keep in check other bugs that do. Since food poisoning often is the result of adding an unfriendly bacteria to your stomach who then grows out of control feasting on the food you’ve just eaten and completely upsetting your natural eco-system, yogurt is normally a great cure for it.
But I had just sent the yogurt bugs down into my stomach eco-system along with their favorite food. And my stomach eco-system exists at their favorite temperature for growth. I had created the conditions in which the yogurt bugs would go insane and completely displace my stomach eco-system. With in an hour or two I was in extreme pain with really bad gas and a massive stomach ache. And hour or two later I was throwing up in the toilet. I had, basically, given myself food poisoning by introducing a live bacteria along with its favorite food to my stomach. I’m an idiot some times.



