Gastroenteritis halts 365

I’d been working the 2pm till midnight evening shift on both Saturday and Sunday. Now normally I would have taken the train up to work with my bike and cycled home at night when there is very little in the way of traffic on the Highway. However, as is the want of Railtrack, they had decided to cancel all trains on the Northern Line for the whole weekend for track works and replace them with buses.

The 3 problems with the buses are firstly that you can’t take a bike on them which means I wouldn’t be able to cycle home. Secondly they are erratic in their timetabling and in order to make it to work on time I would have to be at the bus stop at least 2 hours before I was due to start. The final problem is that they don’t run that late and trying to get a bus from Hornsby to St Leonards at 00:30 is akin to nightmarish.

That left only one option and, as has happened before when it comes to weekend track works, I had to cycle the 18km in both directions two days in a row. That in itself is not an issue but when it’s 29C outside and you get to work and find that the place is stowed with patients and the weekend near-skeletal staff are run off their feet then you know instantly that breaks for food are going to be difficult to take if not impossible. Drinking enough water to replace the rivers of sweat I’d lost on the up-hill slog was also going to be an issue.

Already you can see that the weekend was shaping up to be just bloody shite (and that’s not far off the truth). So not only was I tired, dehydrated, continually sweating and aching in the legs, I was inundated with patients – all of whom had viral gastroenteritis. I don’t know where is comes from here but I’ve seen so much of it in comparison to the UK and I’m amazed that I’ve not been struck down with it before. However, my luck was about to run out.

By Sunday night I was exhausted and by the time I free-wheeled into my street I realised that I was also starving and hadn’t eaten a single thing all day. The glowing signs of the Seven-Eleven (which is strangely open 24 hours instead of 7am – 11pm?!?!) hailed me from across the street and I thought I’d pop in and see if anything was worth eating.

It was the first time I’d been in there and it reminded me of the shops that you would go into on the way home from a night out in Glasgow – the ones that don’t really sell anything nice but for some reason you buy a load of rubbish and wake up in the morning retracing your steps from the night before only to see the carrier bag on the floor of the bedroom full of half eaten sandwiches, crisp packets, chewing gum, red bull, Irn Bru and the odd chicken tikka wrap (which you thought tasted amazing last night). And that about summed up what the Seven-Eleven sold so I settled for a bottle of diet coke, a yogurt and a cheese and ham sandwich.

Pretty innocuous a selection I would have thought and whether it was the sandwich, the yogurt or the fact that I was run down and had been treating gastro patients all weekend I’ll never know but for some reason the next morning the badness began…

I’d not gone to bed till after 2am but I was up at 6:30am when Isla’s alarm clock went off for her to get up and go swimming. I still hadn’t drunk enough fluids and was all stinging eyes and dry-mouthed as I said to her “I don’t feel too good.” I was having some stomach cramps, like trapped wind – or flatus if you want to get technical – which weren’t too bad but just didn’t seem… right. I moped around for a couple of hours without much change in my guts until Isla went to work. After she left I had a shower and went out to the post-office to collect a couple of parcels that were being held for us occasionally clutching my abdomen in the same way that pregnant women do in movies when they are having Branston-Pickle contractions. (Yes I know it’s Braxton-Hicks but imagine how much funnier that last sentence would have been if I’d been eating cheese and Branston Pickle sandwiches the night before).

Anyway, as I stood in the queue (even in Australia the GPO queues are massive on a Monday morning) it felt like Luke and Darth were going for it in my stomach and by the time I got the packages I felt like I was going to fall over from the colicky pain – that I would describe in a medical history as 10/10 pain score, coming in waves and generalised without radiation, now associated with nausea, headaches, fevers and with no exacerbating or relieving factors.

That last bit isn’t exactly true because as I dragged myself back into the flat I realised that there was one relieving factor… don’t read on if you are squeamish!

When I was about 11 years old my school teachers organised for us to spend a day learning to ski at the Cairngorm Mountains in the Highlands of Scotland. Now bear in mind that I went to a State School where nobody was particularly well off and certainly didn’t have a clue about skiing and what it involved. That meant that there was a coach full of underdressed kids without enough waterproof or warm clothing and no concept of how difficult if was going to be to carry around boots, poles and skis. To top it off, when we arrived there was a howling wind and driving sleet to contend with so instead of going to the proper slopes to learn our instructor took me and my group of about 15 pre-pubescents down into a gully beside the exposed and freezing car park and attempted to teach us how to snow plough there.

One of my lasting memories of the day was that there was a small stream running through the middle of the gully and one of my friends had skied up one side of the small valley and then, uncontrolled and completely unintentionally, started to ski backwards towards the water until it became clear that the only way he could stop was to fall over but by the time he attempted this his skis were already in the river and he fell into it soaking himself to the core and bursting into tears. The instructor came running over and lifted him out of the water and then took him in search of the teachers and the keys for the coach so he could get changed out of his dripping clothes.

My next memory is how hard work it was clambering up and down the hillside and how despite the cold winds and freezing ice storm I was incredibly hot and thirsty – camel-packs hadn’t been invented in those days – and when one of my class mates said “We could drink the melt water” with what I now know was more than a hint of uncertainty, “I think it’s pure” our thirst got the better of us. So with that ludicrous suggestion about 9 of us ditched our skis knelt down by the river and began guzzling the ice cold water. It was incredibly refreshing and tasted like melt water should – thirst quenching, clean, crisp and healthy.

In fact it was quite the opposite and when the instructor returned from the car park he was in full sprint (as much as his ski boots and the rough terrain allowed) screaming, “STOP DRINKING THAT WATER!” Actually it was quite a frightening sight having a relative stranger clumsily tearing towards us through the snow covered heather waving his arms in the air and bellowing at the top of his lungs but on hind sight I can see why he was so distressed especially after he explained that some of that water was run-off from the restaurant at the top of the hill. As a group of 11 year olds we just shrugged our shoulders and when back to attempting to ski which most of us gave up on soon after.

My final memory of that trip was the explosive diarrhoea which came that night once I was home with the unbridled fury of dysentery or cholera and how for 2 days I had absolutely no control over my bowels – a scary situation that 8 other people in my class were also in. Not the most pleasant way to end a ski trip!

Anyway I was talking about relieving factors… So as I got in from the post office I had a sudden flash back to the seconds before the culmination of my sewer water drinking experience and dashed into the bathroom where all hell broke loose. And I mean ALL HELL! Daemons, spectres, devils, ghouls and even maggot infested undead animals that have been buried in pet cemeteries and then brought back to life by black magic. All things in this world that were evil were deposited in the toilet but thankfully with the relief of some of the pain and discomfort I’d been suffering.

The smell though was something else. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that sometimes poo just smells… wrong! The smell of stool is actually a reasonable diagnostic tool in Medicine and you can often smell someone has had melena (stool with blood in it from a bleed in their upper digestive tract) before you even enter the room or you know that someone should be isolated because they smell of Clostridium difficile infection. And it’s not unusual to see “foul smelling stool” written in medical notes – I realise that nobody’s crap smells of roses but I just write this to illustrate that there are certain faecal smells that are “abnormal”.

Anyway when I was about 5 years old I was in the town centre with my Mum and little sister and while Mum coached 3 and half year old Sophie in that great female institution called “shopping” I was left outside playing out on the rain soaked concrete. I don’t really remember what I was doing but I do remember slipping on something and landing in a horrible carrot and noodle ridden puddle of drunk-man’s vomit. I also remember that I was wearing my primary school uniform and it was covered with the puke. The next few minutes went very quickly and merge into an amalgamation of me crying in a shop, then getting a hiding in said shop as my Mum screams “Look what you’ve done to your uniform,” Slap, “Ergh, now you’ve got it on me!” Slap slap slap. Then I was dragged in a dislocating-shoulder sort of way to the car and made to strip off and sit naked in the back seat until we got home. Thanks for that Mum.

As I said that all happened when I was about 5 and the memory is vague and distorted but one thing that has never changed is my memory for that rancid stench that filled my nostrils with such a horrid acidic acridity that I hoped I’d never smell that again. Well when I dropped my insides for the first time during this gastro episode that is exactly what it smelt like – old tramp puke. Although I have to ask the obvious question which is “Does my gastro crap smell like the chunderings of some old homeless codger that’s drank too much or did I really slip in vomit?”

Regardless, the flat stank for the next 48 hours and poor Isla really didn’t want to have anything to do with me because of the reek emanating from my pores, skin and orifices. It’s much like the time one of my parents cats became really unwell and the other 2 cats refused to let him sleep near them or feed from the same bowl as they could smell his “unwellness”. I think on an unconscious level that happened with Isla and therefore I ended up sleeping on the couch. In fairness to her though I was up every hour to squirt out some more toxic dribblings and kept opening and closing windows in rhythm with my cycles of fevers and chills so sleeping in separate rooms was probably just as well from her sanity point of view.

So this ended up continuing for three whole days and the worst thing about it all was it happened during my days off! What a waste and in fact the only thing I’ve done in that time apart from set new world records for the amount of toilet paper used and sharts done in a 24 hour period is write this. Shit chat I know but hey it’s something for the blog.