Yesterday I had the trots all day. I also started running a fever. By 10pm, despite taking Advil, my fever was 103. I added Tylenol and it came down, finally, to 101.7.
I had chills, aches, pains and a raging headache, also nausea. I also had a frequent need to urinate (no burning pain). Every 5 minutes. I do have a history of kidney stones. No agonizing pain in my back or side. Just an ache high up on my left side.
By midnight I was having trouble walking and needed to lean on a wall. I looked like a stumbling drunk.
This morning I was fine. No fever, everything is gone, except the headache (I have headaches every day though, so we’ll set that aside). I’m also really, really tired.
So what happened? Was that food poisoning? A particularly wretched kidney stone? A weird virus? Any ideas?
Seems like food poisoning, I didn’t have any symptoms like that w/ my kidney stone.
At the very least, you sound dehydrated. Along w/ water, maybe get some frozen yogurt and bananas.
Everything except the pain in your upper left side, fits things I’ve always attributed to mild food poisoning. Of course, “food poisoning” has always been one of those things that I think of as a general label for eating anything that my body decides to put me through hell for. I don’t think it’s always that the food was “bad,” per se, sometimes it’s just that it was wrong for me at that time. Threw by body chemistry balance off.
I’ve had occasions where I had inexplicable pains, which I eventually decided must have been more or less psychological. Maybe since you’ve had so many kidney stones, your body decided “I know how to make him not do THAT again, I’ll set off the kidney-stone-pain routine.” Of course, upper left side COULD be liver pain. If you had alcohol with the food, maybe it hit your liver wrong.
I’ve never had a fever with food poisoning. It could have been a virus. They can come and go quickly in adults. The headache could have been from dehydration, or from aches that come with infections. The pain seriously could have been from gas. I had a virus once that progressed to vomiting, but it started with pain, and I ended up getting sent to the hospital to have my appendix and gall bladder imaged. They were fine. The doctor said gas pain from an infection can be very bad and gave me some Rx strength gas medicine. The pain was gone by then, though.
I urge you to get checked out for gall stones. What you describe sounds like what happens when you have one. The stone blocks the duct between the liver and the gall bladder and you get all the symptoms you describe. If/when the stone dislodges from blocking the duct, your symptoms disappear quickly – almost by magic.
The fever comes because it’s the start of sepsis. If the stone doesn’t dislodge, the gall bladder can become infected – and you don’t want that.
If your doc recommends it, they can do an ultrasound and that will usually reveal the stone(s).
I would think that either diarrhea or vomiting, or both, would be a presentation of food poisoning. If you didn’t have either of those, I’d assume that nothing was going wrong in your alimentary or digestive system.
A lot of people use ‘food poisoning’ either generically or just plain incorrectly, the same way a lot of people say “I have the flu” when they’re vomiting, IME. Saying you have the flu when you have some kind of random bug is just a pet peeve of mine, so whatever, but as someone in the food service industry, I really do take an issue to people saying they have food poisoning when they don’t, when it hasn’t been confirmed (via an actual lab test) or worse, when they flat out refuse to even so much as contact the health department.
No, FTR, I really don’t care if someone just randomly says it in passing and doesn’t name names, but I’ve had people call my store, tell me they got ‘food poisoning’ from (for example) the mayo and leave it hanging there with this ‘so…what are you going to do about it’ attitude. What I find funny is that in nearly every single one of these cases, after some questions I’ll find that the person had a chicken salad sandwich (in this example), soup and fruit salad and was on ‘had the runs’ about 2 minutes later…ummm, so you had allllll that stuff and you know it was the mayo? Even though it’s more likely to be the celery in the chicken salad, the cantaloupe in the fruit salad or the soup if the we screwed up the temperature? Why the mayo? They nearly always pick out a single ingredient.
In every.single.one of these cases I’ve always encourged them to go to a doctor or the hospital or, at the very least, contact our local health department and I always get brushed off. One time, someone did and the result was ‘food poisoning like symptoms’. I called my health inspector who told me not to worry about it since more often than not if you’re the source of a food poisoning, you don’t just get one person sick, lots of people will get sick.
My favorite (and I use that term loosely) time was when an office manager reported that her entire office got sick after eating our food. These are all medical professionals (in an eye doc’s office, but still), each and every one of them got sick ‘within seconds’ of eating the food, not a single one had any interest in getting tested or filing a report with the health department, yet when I after a few back and forths with the office manager he said ‘I don’t understand why you keep calling me’, these two things should have been reversed but I was thinking ‘I’m just trying to understand what happened’, but what came out was ‘because you’re office is telling people we got them sick and that’s not really fair since it’s not confirmed and food poisoning doesn’t usually strike ‘withing seconds’’.
A few things: Now that I think about it, once or twice people must have spoken to the health department since any time that happens it triggers not only a ‘talking to’ and inspection but they’ll also come in take some swabs of a few surfaces and if we have any food left with the same lot number they’ll take a sample as well, and that has happened once or twice.
Also, I don’t care to rehash a debate I had here years ago, but in general if you eat something and get sick in seconds or minutes or hours, it’s probably something you ate yesterday. What’s happening is that whatever you taste as you’re puking is what you blame (or you just blame the last thing you ate. For this reason I always direct people to the health department since they’ll take a very detailed report of damn near everything you ate over the past few days and you might find out that the fast food or prepackaged cold cuts that you had two days ago were the same thing that 15 other people came in about
I understand that some (one that I know of) can show up rather quickly, but that’s not really the point here, the point is that people call me, blame me for getting them sick. It’s fair to assume, IMHO, that they tell their friends/family/social media that I got them sick when more than likely they either don’t have food poisoning at all or didn’t get it from me.
Rant over
TL;DR, For my sake, please don’t blame a place that sells food for making you sick if you A)don’t have a confirmed diagnosis (or, ya know, you did something stupid, if you buy some chicken salad and forget it in your car for 8 hours, throw it away, don’t eat it, just the other day I refused a catering delivery for someone that wanted me to deliver 60 sandwiches at 8am, to be eaten at “between 2 and 3 in the afternoon” and they didn’t have refrigeration. It was a nice chunk of money, but I wasn’t comfortable with it.
Wow, that got really long really fast. It’s way to late to go back and fix a few grammar errors, but one last thing…I have this funny feeling that a lot of people that think they have food poisoning (like people that think they have the flu) are just having some kind of reaction to something. Whether it’s too spicy, they’re lactose intolerant or they’re allergic (hence the ‘within seconds’ complaints I get something). Again, please get tested before you make accusations. If for no other reason, if you did actually get sick and it was actually us and you never saw any kind of medical professional (especially if it was only you that got sick and not an ‘outbreak’), there’s not really going to be anything you can do about it if you wait for it to clear up before taking some kind of action. We have insurance for this, we’ll make it right, but saying ‘I got sick last month…I got better’ is like telling us that you tripped and fell last year but no one saw you and you didn’t tell anyone and you’re all healed up but you want some money. Sorry, I’m not sure what to tell you (and we’ve had (similar) things to that happen as well).
So, that’s my 2 cents, feel free to tear it apart.
Nah. Not going to tear it apart. Other than the fever, I’ve still got all the other symptoms. I’m thinking I should go see someone. My abdominal region is cramping like a bitch and I’m off to the can every few minutes. I’m trying to stay hydrated, but I’m at the point where I don’t see how anyone could.
I’ve never had anything progress quite this way, which is why I posted the thread. I’ll post an update later.
I had pretty much the same thing happen to me last week.
Chills, slight fever, intense diarrhea and hard vomiting, serious weakness and coordination problems
It was over in 24 hours.
Still, the timing seemed wrong for food poisoning as it hit at 10AM and I had an empty stomach. I was vomiting hard but there wasn’t much output and it was all acidic liquid.
I threw out the deli salads ( tuna and potato) that I had for dinner the night before. Classic food poisoning magnets and possibly even worse because they were organic. If they were " off" I didn’t taste it, they were pretty tasty.
I’m totally with you, Joey P. I’m not in the food industry or have any desire to be in it, but every time I hear someone say “Oh, I don’t go there, I/someone I know got food poisoning after eating there,” I completely disregard it. With all the food and surfaces you come into contact every day, how would you know it’s that particular meal or that particular ingredient that caused you to get sick. Sometimes, you can make an educated guess if you have multiple people getting sick but, otherwise, the couple of times I’ve gotten food poisoning, or what I thought might be food poisoning, I wouldn’t be able to say with any sort of confidence what caused it.
If it were food poisoning, it would probably be gone by now, unless you got something really unfortunate that can cause permanent liver or kidney damage, but it still doesn’t sound like you are describing that. I think you either have a virus, or a problem with stones somewhere or your appendix. It sounds like you need to see a doctor. If nothing else, you might need IV fluids at this point.
Just as a cautionary tale, I had a friend in the army who had a bout of diarrhea from eating something that didn’t agree with him, but due to the stress and heavy activity of military training, couldn’t get rehydrated, and kept getting weaker, which increased his stress. He passed out in formation, and wound up in the hospital on IV fluids for two days. If he’d said something, he might have been given a day on quarters and told to drink a half gallon of Gatorade, and been fine.
