Food-borne Illness - The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Friday night and yesterday I had nice holiday time with my family.  But...

Wow.  It has been an ugly and long week.  My apologies for not following through with my plans to post recipes every day, but I got really sick.

Last Saturday I woke up feeling good, my wallet had money and it was time to finally start my Christmas shopping.  First things first, a good brunch to stoke the engine.  I went the healthy route and got an egg white omelet with fresh spinach (at a restaurant that will go unnamed), it tasted pretty good and I was off to the mall.

I hadn't been in the mall very long when I became soaked in sweat.  I thought, well the mall is packed and I am rushing around, no big deal.  Even though no one else was soaking their shirt.  Anyway, I went about trying to get things done and slowly felt worse as the day wore on.  I tried to write it off to a lot of things, but by early evening I knew - I was getting very ill.  I let the boss know and then hoped that my fever and chills would pass without much incident. Uh, nope.

I will save you the details, other than to say, it was fever, vomiting, diarrhea, chills, headache - horrible.  And it didn't last just 24-48 hours like a nice flu.  No, this drug on.  It was traced back to the spinach in my omelet.  It wasn't fully cooked, but I thought nothing of it until much later.  They even briefly thought I had e. coli.  By the way, this is a food-borne illness, not food poisoning.  The food hadn't gone bad, it was tainted by bacteria.

I finally made it back to work on Thursday, 15 pounds lighter and weak.  I was able to eek out some time to Christmas shop so everyone had gifts, but that spent the 'extra' energy I had.

Yesterday I thought I was feeling a bit better, so I ate a regular Christmas dinner.  Turns out, I am not fully recovered.  As I tried to go to bed last night, my body balked at the amount of food I had enjoyed.  It wasn't an insane amount, but compared to the rest of the week, I ate like a queen.  So, I spent most of the night writhing in pain and sweating, very little sleep too.

So, I came to work early.  I have been drinking some gingerbread tea and it is helping.  Going forward for the next week I have a new plan - very small amounts of food and BLAND.  Knowing my body, it will find a way to throw a fit anyway, but I have to give it a try.

Yours in Health,
Kate