It is hard for me to put into words what it feels like to be hit with gastroenteritis, which I had the misfortune yesterday to develop. The symptoms, as recorded in the literature - vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, headache, muscle aches, fever - certainly sound repulsive, but in some ways seem so generic as to produce little emotion in anyone reading about the illness - anyone who is not infected, that is. For those of us who have been hit with the virus, be it norovirus, rotavirus or any of the other Samurai-sounding buggers, the effects of the illness are are much more colorful than these one-word summaries. For example [please do not read below on a full stomach]:
The "muscle aches" feel like you have been stretched out on a rack, beated with tube socks stuffed with walnuts, then plugged into an electrical current - not unlike an afternoon nap in one of Saddam Hussein's interrogation rooms. There is no way short of anesthesia to get comfortable, and try as you will to take your mind off the pain you cannot put it out of your mind. Last night I even watched a 1962 episode of "Top Cat", but it didn't help.
The "vomiting" reminds me of the last fight scene in Raging Bull, where Robert DeNiro gets his guts pounded out of him. Think of your eight year-old nephew jumping up and down on your abdomen followed by a close-up camcorder shot of the inside of a toilet bowl filled with the contents of your last two meals. Ugh.
As far as the rest of the symptoms, they haven't hit me yet and I ain't going to share them with anyone if and when they do, so consider this the last word on the subject. Now if you will excuse me please...
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I just had it too. It was miserable, and I have a pretty high discomfort threshold from all the cancer treatment I've had. Let's just say I lost 6 pounds in two days, and leave it at that.
Hope you're feeling better.
Feel better soon.
Which meaning of On a Cruise is this? Do you mean that you were not partaking in an ignorant rant against pharmopsychiatry?
Guess doctors are people, too. Hope you feel better soon.
Catherine
P.S. And take some sick days!
Hey! Sounds an awful lot like the first week after a round of chemotherapy.
Yep. Agree with you Spinning Liz. Do hope you feel better soon C.O. It's grievous to be in these bodies at times.
I spent thanksgiving with about 35 friends in two cabins. Thursday evening one person came down with gastroenteritis, by Monday evening only eight people had not been afflicted. It was amazing how it friedn spread sharing the room with the first person to get sick, then to the rest of the first cabin, then to the people in the second cabin. And how people would be fine one hour and then sick as a dog the next.
One frame in a classic comic in Sweden shows the mail character looking into the toilet bowl the morning after a serious bender and stating that "no wonder I was feeling sick - my stomach was full of puke!"
About three years ago I began to throw up every day, then two or three times a day, and over a couple of weeks it progressed to, suddenly it seemed to me, ejectile vomiting whatEVER I swallowed. Along the way I was first diarhetic, then totally constipated and stomach-bloated. About halfway through (2nd week) I began to have fairly severe stomach pain all the time. I tried lots of OTC things because I had no medical insurance then, but it just kept getting worse. I'm retired and live alone, and began spending a lot of time in bed just resting. Woke up one morning (3rd week) and couldn't remember when I'd last kept water down, much less food, and that scared me. Not even bits of shaved ice. Ordered in some groceries, mostly popsicles. Stopped trying to eat or drink and just nibbled on a stick of popsicle (I figured -- fluid, salt and sugar, right?). The first day, kept that down, second day, two popsicles, third day was able, very slowly, to begin drinking a little water, and a saltine cracker. The weirdest thing of all was that on the third day I felt this little "pop", or a relaxation of some kind in my tummy. Thereafter, gradually increasing food/fluid intake, no more vomiting and bm's resumed. The nearest thing I could discover to the symptoms on the internet was pyeloric stennosis (sp?), but that just happens to babies. Doesn't it? And it has never come back.
Thanks for your kind words - I'm back to full strength now. I do wish there was an easy way to identify the virus, although this is more of an academic question since the treatment for acute gastroenteritis is the same no matter which virus it is. Still, for us compulsive types we would like to know.
Hey - if you were a cynic you might say that this oncologist got a taste of what it is like to take chemotherapy. Urp! Ralllllpphh! Upchuck!
Of course, being an oncologist I took Zofran ODT tablets, which worked well. I ain't stupid, you know - I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect! (with apologies to the great John Cazale).