Shit Happens

Brian was already asleep on his couch when I came home, his little feet poking out of the bottom of his red checkered blanket.  I gently kissed him on the forehead and went into the bathroom.  It had been a long day.  My friend Michelle and I had gone to Manti to attend a wedding—where we experienced some car problems and other fun adventures—and I felt extremely tired.

Of course I needed to use the restroom before going to bed.  It is a key part of my nightly ritual.  I poop, brush my teeth, then go to bed.  Plain and simple. 

I left the bathroom and tiptoed quietly to the bedroom where I changed out of my dress clothes and into my comfy pajama bottoms.  I turned out the light, crawled into bed and went to sleep.  Well, I tried to go to sleep, but I had this strange feeling in my stomach like I had to go to the bathroom again.  I tossed and turned for twenty minutes or so, arguing with my body and insisting that it really didn’t need to use the facilities.

Although I debated valiantly, I ultimately lost that argument.  I found myself bolting out the door and into the bathroom.  I sat my bare butt on the toilet just in the nick of time and immediately thought of that scene in Bridesmaids where Megan screams “It’s coming out of me like hot lava!”  At least I wasn’t crapping in a sink…

I went back to bed again feeling very strange.  My stomach seemed to be churning butter like some kind of colonial woman (that’s another Bridesmaids reference for those in the know) and a strange heat seemed to be radiating from my buttocks.  Seriously, strange stuff was happening.  Strange stuff!

I managed to fall asleep for an hour or so at a time, experiencing strange hallucinations which eventually ended in me defecating on something or someone embarrassing.  At that point in the dream I would sit up, wide-eyed and fearful, and book it to the bathroom to shoot out liquid fire all over again.  All night long I continued the cycle of fevered sleep and nightmarish crapping.  It was horrible.  I was up at 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am… on and on until it was time to get up for work.

From the all-too-familiar perch of the toilet, I sent Michelle a text complaining about the awful night. Lo and behold, she had experienced one very similar.

“Oh my gosh,” I said.  “Do you think we got sick at the wedding?”

“From what?”

“From the luncheon?  We had those pork burritos…”

Later on, checking Facebook, I discovered that Michelle’s brother-in-law Dustin was also sick.  So sick in fact that he was taken to the hospital.  And one by one through telephone calls, text messages, and Facebook statuses it was confirmed that everyone who ate the pork at the wedding had gotten food poisoning.  Some one hundred people, including children and the elderly, were all sick.

“I’m so sorry,” Michelle said to me later on at work, as I was coming back from the restroom.  “It’s all my fault.”

“No, it’s not.  Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.  Shit happens… literally.”