This made me remember a time I got sick and had to stay home alone. I spent the day eating blueberry Pop-tarts, which were basically my favorite food. Now I can’t even look at a Pop-tart without feeling ill. I had accidentally conditioned myself to associate Pop-tarts with illness and now, twenty years later, I still can’t stand the sight of them.
- Kidney stones, numerous occasions.
- Food poisoning, once.
- Herniated disk, back surgery. Two surgeries, pain on and off for many years.
- Toothache, a couple times.
I’ve passed nine kidney stones. Hard to top that for systemic pain not caused by external trauma.
The usual third-world travel diseases: Amoebic dysentery, Hepatitis-A, Giardia, a few others that third-world doctors have names and drugs for, but I don’t know what they were.
I did have measles when I was a little kid, but I don’t remember much about it. I do remember my mom had a bed set up for me in the living room so she could watch me every minute, so I guess I was pretty sick.
Mononucleosis when I was in college. I remember feeling 3/4 asleep all the time for about two months. I had to miss a semester of college and repeat it.
Remember about 2005 or so when we were advised to for God’s sake get a vaccine because that year’s flu was especially severe, yet vaccines had run way short? I got that flu and they were not kidding. I felt like I was actually dying a couple of times, and was not strong enough to get off the bed to get a cup of tea. It was a month and a half before I felt really well. Gah. I’ve gotten my flu shot every year since then.
About five years ago I got really, really sick. After suffering for three or four days I got to a doctor who’s diagnosis was “some kind of virus”.
- Completely lost my equilibrium. Couldn’t stand up or walk without holding on to a wall or something.
- Blurry tunnel vision.
- Burning pain in the pit of my stomach but no nausea, vomiting or diarrhea.
4.Extreme fatigue, unlike anything I ever experienced before or since. - Muffled hearing.
- Constant headache.
- Cognitive problems.
So I finally get to the doctor, feeling fairly certain he’s going to put me in the hospital and he told me it was some kind of virus, no prescriptions, just told me to take Advil and aspirin, alternately, every four hours and I’d be fine in a day or two.
He was right.
Meningitis when I was 13. Before then, I had migraines, none since. I don’t recommend the cure.
Fighting kidney stones. The pain was like nothing else I’ve ever felt. I lost my right kidney to them.
Caught whooping cough from the neighbor’s kids. Coughing until you vomit for several weeks was oh so fun. I was kind of hoping I’d die at one point. I was also quarantined by the public health authorities.
The only other fun episode was a nasty bought of influenza several years ago. I remember experiencing a sudden horrible headache at work, making my excuses, and rushing home and that’s it. I have no memory of three days. I woke up on the floor wrapped in a dozen blankets feeling a bit stiff.
Stroke, heart issues, broken bones; I’ve had a lot of various serious illnesses and never look at any of them as “the sickest”. For that I have to go back about 15 years to a very bad flu, cold, and some kind of minor infection all at basically the same time. For a couple days I was really (and seriously) afraid I would die; the next couple days I was afraid I would live. Needless to say I hope I never feel that sick again in my life.
Kidney stones and migraines. Not sick so much as in pain. To be honest, some (a lot) of those migraines topped the kidney stone pain, it’s just a different kind of pain.
#1 The 2014 flu.
#2 The 2012 stomach whatever. I permanently lost 5 pounds off that one.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
My wife and I ate a nice dinner at a barbecue restaurant that rhymes with Amos Paves. We traced it to the coleslaw. About midnight I woke up to my wife in the bathroom I thought I should help her, but by he time I got to the bathroom it hit me too.
At one point, I was trying to help her but I passed out. On the way down I took out a plant stand with a glass watering ball that crushed under my arm and cut me pretty deep. I probably needed stitches but could not stop throwing up long enough to go to emergency.
When my daughter cam home, she thought, because of the blood puddle, that we had been murdered.
Longhair, I’m assuming that your arm healed up OK?
For me, I was working for a temp agency (VERY LONG story made short) and was sent to a small town about 200 miles away to cover for a former co-worker at a grocery store pharmacy. I drove in the day before, feeling a bit under the weather, but stopped by anyway to say hello and get information I would need for the next day (alarm settings, that kind of thing). The next morning, I literally could not get out of bed. I had no vomiting or diarrhea, but I was very weak and definitely running a fever. It was the only time in my life that I have ever considered calling an ambulance, and if that motel had caught fire, I would have died because I couldn’t have gotten myself out of there.
The temp agency did eventually find someone else who could work for me. They asked me, “Can you just curl up in the corner and have the technicians give you prescriptions to check?” and I replied, “If I could get there, I would.”
By late afternoon, I was feeling a little better and spent that night at my parents’ house, which was about an hour’s drive away.
September of 2009: H1N1 flu during my first trimester when I was expecting Lily. I was 39 and pregnant, anemic as hell, and absolutely, positively could not take off from work - the hotel owners were out of the country, and another co-worker’s husband was in hospice, and there were only 3 people to cover 2 weeks, 24/7. I brought a sleeping bag and slept in the office in between check-ins*. And then I’d go home and sleep 11 hours before going back for a 12-hour shift. When I finally got a day off, I literally slept 23 hours straight - woke up to my mother and my husband hovering over me, debating whether I needed an ambulance. I was okay, and more importantly, so was the baby, so hooray.
*And every check-in took forever, because I was gloving up, and then wiping down keys and pens with Lysol wipes before handing anything to guests. This was about a month before the vaccine became available that season, so that was the best I could do to keep anyone else from getting sick, along with spraying/wiping the phones and computer keyboards and doorknobs at the end of my shift - because we sure as hell couldn’t afford to be down another employee.
My other sickest episode was when I had mono in college. I came down with it just before Halloween, and by Thanksgiving I was finally up and moving around slowly. I had lost about 20 pounds during that time. (And I was only about 135 at the start - not fat, at 5’9". I’d have probably died of dehydration, except that my blessed roommate would come in my room at various intervals (I don’t know what those were - regularly enough to keep me alive,) and force juice and soup and ginger ale down my gullet. He’d pinch my nose to make me open my mouth, because I was just too tired to eat or drink, and my throat hurt. And then he’d carry me into the bathroom and leave me long enough to go potty. Nice guy. He made a good husband and father. But I never want to see another can of Campbell’s Chicken and Anything soup again.
January 2010: 1st year of high school. Somehow managed to tear the lining of my stomach during a class excursion. First started vomiting in the bathroom of a restaurant, excused myself to go home, and was found a few hours later collapsed across the toilet by my mother coming back from work. I had vomited somewhere in the realm of 1.5 liters of blood and was admitted to the ER in stage 3 hypovolemic shock.
Had the bleeding not spontaneously stopped at some point there’s a non-insignificant risk that I could simply have exsanguinated right there on my bathroom floor before I even got to a hospital; by the time I made it home I was already too weak and confused to operate a phone. I got off very, very easy and only had to be kept in the ICU for a little over a day while it was confirmed that the bleeding was stopped and I was given fluids - but there was a point where I was bent over the toilet vomiting blood non-stop where I was pretty sure I was going to die, and quite frankly I was entirely OK with that notion because at least the vomiting would stop.
Pneumonia, in the winter of 1962, when I was nineteen, the only serious illness I have ever had and the only time I was hospitalized. And the most painful shot I have ever had; injection of some horrible medicine in my left buttock. Wow!
I went from a healthy, physically strong 165 pounds to a miserable 145, resembling something out of a documentary about concentration camps.
Since then, so far; so good. I know time is not on my side, but I have been lucky.
Yeah, my food poisoning was definitely the worst I’ve ever FELT. Caution, the rest of this is graphic. Don’t read this at mealtime!
2 days before New Years 2013, we ate a a new City Barbecue (regional chain local to the Ohio area). I was halfway through a piece of chicken when I found that parts of it were green, as if there had been an infection. Although I didn’t eat another bite, the damage was done. It didn’t hit me for almost 24 hours, though. Then, the deluge.
I barfed and had diarrhea at the same time (fortunately, not literally at the same moment). Other than heading to the bathroom, I didn’t leave the bed for the next 3 days, or do anything at all, not even watch TV. If I had owned a gun I would have euthanized myself - that’s not an exaggeration. It was 2 days before I could even handle water without barfing it back up.
I started recovering on Day 4. By then I had lost 13 pounds in 3.5 days.
I finally was able to try another piece of BBQ chicken 6 months ago (not from City Barbecue!).
Tuberculosis in 1975. I wanted to die. Every breath was pure torture.
Food poisoning in 2010, while having a full cast on my left arm.
Several hangovers from my binge drinking.
Food poisoning for me as well. August 2008, I remember because it was during the Beijing Summer Olympics. I was too sick to get up off the couch for about four days. I developed an appreciation for water polo during that time because that was what was being televised during the day.
Most of my family had been at a bridal shower on Sunday and by Monday we were all down. Me, Mom, my 8-months pregnant sister, my grandmother and two aunts. Somehow the bride didn’t get sick. We thought it might have been the chicken salad sandwiches.
My poor dad had just had surgery on his foot but he still went out and bought me Gatorade because that was the only thing I could keep down. Not the recommended way to lose ten pounds.
Probably the worst I’ve ever felt was in 2008, got a case of ‘Delhi Belly’ while travelling in India. It hit me around 1am and I spent the next few hours slumped in a shower with the water running while everything I’d eaten for the past 2 months fell out of me.
Around 3pm we were due to catch a train to the next city on our tour. I was able to carry my backpack through the station and then lay down on the concrete platform using my pack for a pillow until it was time to board the train.
I was lucky, though a few others in my group got it while on the train (overnight trip) and only had the train toilets to use, which were both squat affairs rather than sit down toilets.
A few months after that I got viral pleurisy which the Doc thought I may have caught on the plane back from India. That was a bad week, when it first hit I thought I was having a heart attack - chest pain and trouble breathing.
2010: I got appendicitis, spent a Sunday feeling poor and feverish, went to the doctor on Monday morning and while he was obviously worried didn’t send me to hospital. The ambulance crew who came to pick me up from home that afternoon were very critical in their opinion of his actions.