Midnight rolls around and I wake up. I start getting that little intestinal gurgle. Nothing worrying, nothing out of the ordinary. And no symptoms before that. A brief stop at the toilet to sort things out, and that’s that. Back to bed.

1am rolls around and something new wakes me up. This time it’s the stomach. I waited for a while to see if it would subside, and wondering if this was something I needed to get ahead of. Wondering gave way to certainty, so off to the toilet again. Up came the evening’s tacos, and given that I like ’em spicy, it was an unpleasant festival indeed. That took quite a while to empty, but cleaned up and seemingly sorted, back to bed. And then back to the toilet for more.

We can dispense with the play by play here but there’s still some detail needed to tell the whole, horrible tale. Eventually it was pure liquid coming out of either end of me, frequently both ends at once. One of those was definitely the most impressive projectile vomiting I’ve ever achieved. And eventually as I got up to flush again I noticed that the ejecta from the other end was… well, not brown anymore. Luckily, not red either. Eventually there was simply nothing left to exit.

It struck me later that basically, I was on an unwanted, violent body cleanse. It was unpleasant getting there, but there was a small satisfaction in knowing I basically had no fecal matter left in me. Imagine you intestines trying to literally wring themselves dry, then challenging your stomach to a competition. That’s what my evening was like.

By the time morning rolled around I felt like crap in all sorts of amazing ways. Dehydration was number one: I’d tried a few mouthfuls of water but they came back up in minutes. Instead, just wetting my mouth and spitting it back out kept it tolerable. Erin woke up with her alarm (she had astonishingly slept through all of this), but took Zoe to school and grabbed the normal sickness stuff… Gatorade, ginger ale, etc. I found that ingesting those two very slowly, alternatingly, let me keep it down, though there was still some protest from the gut.

Erin also, very kindly, cleaned up the leftover mess in the bathroom. Bless her.

Two new symptoms rolled in about now, though. One was a handful of sudden, simultaneous cramps that were both exceptionally painful and very slow to unwind, which was just insult to injury if you ask me. The other was the fever that I suffered for the rest of the day and into the evening.

I emailed the office (slowly and carefully, the fever had me feeling pretty dopey) to tell them I’d be out for the day and set my out of office auto-reply to tell people I had caught “the plague, or maybe some kind of curse”. And then I settled into the Comfy Couch of Suffering Illnesses to sleep the day away, sipping Gatorade now and then.

By evening I was on the road to being properly hydrated again and was able to eat some saltines and cookies.

Ugh. Still about 5 pounds down. Been aggressively re-hydrating so that should be back to normal by now. I still find I have zero appetite but have been able to eat safely for a day now. The biggest worry at this point is whether I’m going to have passed it on to the family. Yet there’s no sign of that now. Lucky me.

Not a recommended weight loss plan though. Unless you really, truly hate yourself.