I love Thanksgiving. I love the food, I love just hanging out with friends, it’s probably my favorite holiday. I cook a ton every year and invite anyone who doesn’t already have plans due to no family in the area, no desire to cook, etc.
I went to the gym in the morning and felt a little “off:” my legs were a little wobbly on the treadmill but I powered through and was able to finish the workout still feeling relatively ok.
So I get all the food done without too much hassle-- there’s way too much of everything, but the turkey looks good, potatoes are whipped to perfection, gravy came out well, blah blah blah.
Everyone’s having a good time and I make it through about 1/2 of my plate of food and … I start to feel weird. I literally can’t eat another bite. I run (hobble) upstairs and sit there for a few minutes… start sweating profusely… mouth goes dry… I haven’t thrown up in probably 20 years but here we are, violently emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet.
I clean up and make it back downstairs, feeling marginally better. I don’t want anyone to know anything is wrong so I try to make conversation but it ain’t easy. I’m sure I look pale and sickly. I’m fine for maybe 20, 30 minutes-- but I can feel it coming back, and I slowly make my way upstairs again for more quality time with the toilet.
I was horrified that maybe something was wrong with the food and but the party continued just fine and everyone else was thankfully unaffected. I guess it’s just a terrible coincidence that I came down with the stomach flu on Thanksgiving.
But the worst part? Now Thanksgiving food-- even just the smell-- is setting off my gag reflex something fierce. Hopefully by Thanksgiving '14, I’ll be back to normal
I had an almost exactly similar experience at an Easter dinner a few years back. It was months before I could even look at the word “ham” without tasting bile coming up in my throat.
Well, there’s no such thing as stomach flu. You had food poisoning. But maybe you were exposed before you started preparing the meal. Glad you’re feeling better, and that your guests didn’t get ill.
I had this in January. Vomiting and diarrhea for almost 24 hours. It was 2 weeks before I felt normal. I blame it on the bagged salad I ate that day. It took me months to eat a salad again. By T-Day 2014 you will be fine.
Oooh, my sympathies. I had a stomach virus a couple years ago that knocked me flat for 3 days. Woke up in the middle of the night, and it was the first time since I was maybe 8 years old that I simply didn’t have time to get to the toilet before vomiting. Thankfully I had randomly kept a plastic bucket under my bed and was able to throw up in that, or it would have been all over the carpet. The next 36 hours were pretty much the same with anything I swallowed before it started to let up. It was completely miserable.
I remember once eating a Wendy’s salad, feeling odd and excusing myself to the bathroom, throwing up everything I’d just eaten, and then coming back and finishing the salad with no problem. I think it was a reaction to antibiotics. But it was the first time in my life that I’d thrown up while eating something and not developed an aversion to it. 20 years later and I still can’t drink fruit punch.
That’s what I was going to say - I had cause to research this last week*, and there are a number of common viruses that cause what people call “stomach flu.”
*Came down with gastroenteritis on Tuesday, and was sick until Friday. My birthday was Wednesday.
ETA: Forgot to say, sorry you had a crappy Thanksgiving, and hope you’re feeling better, amaguri.
You could have accidentally touched something while your hands had uncooked poultry ‘blood’ and then eaten it. Cross contamination can happen easily. One year our roomie set a whole chicken on a top shelf of the fridge to thaw and it dripped chicken slime on everything and we took almost 3 hours cleaning and decontaminating everything, and lost everything in the veggie drawer:(
