The stomach pains hit me the week after Thanksgiving, midday, shortly after I noticed the deli-turkey sandwich I had eaten for lunch was settling about as well as if I had swallowed a mouthful of cat litter.

Since my wife got pregnant, we’ve watched the development of our hidden baby mainly through weekly progress reports and baby-inside-the-womb illustrations emailed to us from Babycenter.com. So it wasn’t too far a leap to imagine that the surly bit of turkey running amok inside my gut was growing at top speed into a full-blown turkey, a twenty-pounder perhaps, and later I concluded, a vicious gamecock. 

Yep, it looked to be an inside job, a little message from the ghosts of the turkeys I’d eaten for Thanksgiving. No number of Tums could tame the bird. And any shimmer of relief came only when I balled up on the couch, clenched my stomach, and let my mouth hang open so my soul could moan. Right then, death didn’t seem like such a bad option.  

At the first subtle onslaught, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was dealing with. I thought it was nothing a mere trip to the bathroom couldn’t solve. But the pain swelled with rock-gut intensity, to the point where I wondered whether I’d be able to finish out my workday. Once home, I threw on roughly five sweatshirts and collapsed on the couch in the dark, like a wounded Michelin Man. My stomach continued to bloat and harden like road kill. I clutched the sides of the couch in emergency lifeboat fashion, waiting to hurl overboard.

When my wife came home, she asked me some dutiful questions about my condition, and then sealed herself up safely in our room, where she’d stay for the remainder of the evening. The plague and I were quarantined to the couch. Soon, I slipped into a shivering sleep, dreaming wild, maddening dreams, only to wake up again at an odd hour, burning up. The Christmas tree in the corner blazed with stomach-turning vividness. I prayed an angel would unplug it; the thought of doing it myself, for some reason, made my insides heave. Nonetheless, I mustered the energy to remove a sock, and that would do for now. 

I woke up next time convinced I had heard someone shushing me. I searched frantically around the room for the shusher and fought a good fight with the blankets and the sweatshirts that had turned against me sometime during the night, spinning themselves into an effective straitjacket. ”What! What!” I cried out in a semiconscious blur, only to be answered by the lurid lights of the Christmas tree. This turkey was pulling no punches; now I was hallucinating. Later I concluded that the night shusher was either my old high school librarian, Mrs. Matthews, who’d somehow broken in, or my dog sneezing beside my head.

To my surprise I did wake up the next morning. I couldn’t help but feel mildly victorious at having survived. I felt a little better but not much. I forced down a couple Saltines for strength and even tried some tomato soup, which smelled so pungently of tomatoes it nearly dropped me on the spot. After three spoonfuls I dumped the whole mess down the drain, warding off any feelings of guilt over knowing that that would’ve been two-day’s worth of food for an Ethiopian kid.     

The next few days consisted of more of me on the couch and were pretty much redundant, much too dull to write about here. But, in retrospect, if I had to pick through the ashes of my illness, I would take away from my experience this one thing: next Thanksgiving I’m sticking to stuffing.

Categories: Food