I didn’t eat all day, I rarely do. I felt perfect, absolutely perfect.
I picked up a few fried chicken wings and potato wedges at the market while shopping (which I now believe might have been innocent: I also remember that I picked up a package of raw chicken that was dripping blood. I wiped my hand but didn’t wash it, then ate the fried chicken twenty minutes later) and, as I jsut said, ate some on the way home.
I went to the computer for maybe 20-30 minutes. Felt perfectly fine. Took another couple bites of chicken, and in 30 seconds I realized: “Oh my god…I think I need to throw up!”
Now this NEVER EVER EVER EVER happens to me. EVER. I NEVER throw up without hours of misery preceding it, so I couldn’t believe it. But sure enough, I went from feeling perfectly fine to violently and thoroughly emptying my stomach in less than 5 minutes, and in less than an hour after eating.
I was very conscious that it felt like my body was clearly rejecting the food specifically, especially since the minute I was empty, I felt fine. (Well, not fine, I felt kinda punched out, but I wasn’t at all nauseated.) That was three hours ago and I am starving and have had no other symptoms.
What the HELL can slam you down that hard, that fast? And what is actually taking place? Does the body really somehow recognize poison and reject it, or is the thing…organizsm, whatever it is, somehow directly, chemically irritating the stomach lining?
I can’t answer your question but I’ve had something similar happen. I’d been given a packed lunch of ham and salad to eat at work, but I didn’t eat it because I was too busy. The food had been sitting in an Esky with a couple of ice packs but after 6 hours it probably wasn’t all that sanitary. When I ate it after work I vomited before I’d finished it. Same as you, one minute feeling fine, next minute I’m vomiting and then I’m feeling ok again, a bit exhausted and sweaty but not nauseous.
I wonder if there isn’t some “superstitious learning” going on here. Suppose you were coming down with the flu—and just before the symptoms hit, you ate something. Suppose it was chocolate. The brain equates it; chocolate=horrible side effects.
The doctor told me that it takes about three hours after the food is ingested for the symptoms of food poisoning to develop. That is about how long it took me. I was very sick all night and I felt bad for several days. Even two weeks later my appetite was still affected.
When you first get food poisoning, you can be so sick that you can become dehydrated.
According to the wikipedia article on food poisoning it typically takes many hours to days before symptoms set in. If it was just a few hours that article says that usually indicates “…a bacterial toxin or chemical rather than live bacteria”. Less than one hour seems awful fast…could you just have had an upset stomach and a batch of greasy fried food triggered the eject mechanism?
I’ve had food poisoning twice and both times it was a drawn-out journey through hell with hours of vomiting and barely-controllable diarrhea. Eventually there was nothing left to give which didn’t stop my body from trying (landed me in the ER once, dehydrated and with severe muscle cramps throughout my body). Barfing once and then feeling fine sounds to me like you ate something nasty and your body immediately rejected it as unsuitable, rather than letting something awful fester in your gut.
The food you ate was alraedy contaminated with bacterial toxins, this could cause vomiting within one hour, and its not the bacteria driectly that does it - its the fact that bacteria have had time to produce toxins already.
The food you ate was contaminated with something else, chemical for instance like cleaning fluids or the like.
The food you ate contains something to which you have an allergy or inteolerance - onset can be very swift.
You have consumed something some time ago, and its a coincidence in timing that the symptoms have emerged when they did - shortly after eating.
Well, there are kinds of food poisoning that happen nearly instantaneously - I think I’ve read that one of them tends to hang out in old rice, and it’s on the order of seconds from food to sick. I’m sure that’s a toxin, though.
IANAD, but two people I know, had this symptom. Greasy or heavily spiced foods and instant sickness can be a gall bladder attack. My wife’s was so bad she had hers taken out immediately. Family friend waited 10 years and just had his out. He ate some fast food and got sick in like 10 min. Which for him was a familiar thing. Kinda keep track, if it is persistent, tell your doctor.
I had food poisoning from clams. Neither my wife or I had symptoms for about 48 hours. Then we both went through hell. It took a few days to recover. It was the only meal we shared for those days,so we could identify it. It was also at an expensive restaurant.
Some poisons produce almost immediate vomiting. Syrup of ipecac is an example.
Assuming your vomiting was related to “food posioning” an hour onset is not outside of the possible range.
What is loosely termed “food poisoning” comes in two broad varieties:
1: The offending organism multiplies in the food itself and produces a toxin that is ingested along with the food, or
2: The organism is ingested, and as it multiplies within your intestine, makes you sick.
Examples of the first type include staphylococcal toxin, toxins from Bacillus Cereus and Clostridium Perfringens, scombroid, cigatuera, and many others. Some of these more commonly produce vomiting; some diarrhea. Either can give you cramps. A big load of staph toxin would be an example of a food poisoning that can give you vomiting within an hour or so. As a rule of thumb I tell patients who get violently nauseated and are vomiting within a couple of hours that their resolution will be almost as rapid, and usually within 12-18 hour time window. The original organism itself no longer produces the toxin once ingested.
Examples of the second type are Salmonella, Shigella, E Coli and so on. Since these are live infections, the host can remain ill indefinitely. I don’t usually like to refer to this group as “food poisoning” but the label is applied commonly because the illness may have been related to ingested food (or some other fecal-oral spread).
Don’t gots no gall bladder, had mine removed about 5 years ago. And it almost killed me, too, because I didn’t really have any symptoms, the problem was discovered accidentally, and when they removed the gall bladder they discovered incipient necrosis, which would have killed me within weeks.
It’s always nice when you can be certain. I played poker and ate chinese with friends on a saturday night some years ago, and between late Sunday night and early Monday morning, all of us were flattened by the worst food poisoning I’ve ever experienced. I couldn’t stay awake or sit up for more than a minute or two for almost two days.
I’ve never eaten there again, and they were on notice from the health department some years later in a citywide crackdown.
Incidentally, i swabbed down everything I touched, including the produce I had purchased after touching the raw chicken and fortunately was only hard fruit, with a Clorox solution.
I didn’t want to re-live the magic.
I do have to say, though, after a lifetime of being semi-hysterical about vomiting, doing so sans the hours of sweaty nausea is way less horrible. Still definitely very unpleasant, but as a relatively brief act disassociated from everything else, it wasn’t that bad.
A few years ago I made myself a hot dog. I took two bites, then I ran to the sink to vomit. I looked at the package of hot dogs and it turns out they were 3 weeks past the expiration date. Some of them had mold on them. From the first bite to the time I had to vomit was maybe 3 minutes. It also gave me severe diarrhea about 30 minutes later. I was sick for several days.
For a while there I was having immediate onset vomiting from eating shellfish. Always mollusks, not sure if that was coincidence or not. It was like my stomach would turn inside out, sometimes while still in the restaurant. Then I felt better almost immediately. I got tested for shellfish allergy - no sign of any reaction on the test. I did, however, give up eating shellfish because the thought of an incipient hurl really put me off the idea.
I can’t find a cite now, but I remember reading somewhere that there was something in shellfish as it got past its prime that could cause a disulfiram-like (like the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse) reaction if consumed with alcohol. At least some of these times were nice meals when I probably would have had a glass of wine with dinner, although I can’t remember for sure. Anyone else ever heard of that reaction from shellfish?
I had the exact same thing happen to me twice. Each time I had scallops and shrimp. Each time it was an hour or so after eating and I felt better once I was vomited out. Both incidents happened within a couple months of each other. I think I only had alcohol with one of those shellfish dinners but it was so long ago I’m not sure.
I eventually ventured to eat shrimp again and didn’t have a problem so I decided I must be allergic to scallops. I had eaten many other shellfish since then (clams, crab, lobster, squid, mussels) and not had a reaction. But recently I was tested for allergies and was not allergic to any shellfish. So I risked a few scallops since then and have not had a repeat of the reaction.
It’s fascinating to me how quickly and powerfully those associations are made, even when you know better. Last night, right before I got the word from my tummy that things were going into reverse, I had prepared a nice cuppa joe with some creamy vanilla stuff in it. I touched it to my tongue, didn’t even take a swallow, and it was that precise moment that the reaction came. The idea of drinking the same concoction freaked me out later.
Factoid (since we who inhabit the Dope are all about the factage): Horses cannot vomit. I watched some Animal Planet vet show once where they had to do surgery on a horse to empty it’s gut because it was backed up and it would have died if they didn’t. Pretty amazing footage, too: yards of impacted horse intenstine the size of your thigh, sliced open and tons of chewed grain and hay spill forth…