This week has been a kind of awful that I have not experienced for probably 20 years or more. Tuesday night, I started to feel progressively ill. Like the kind of ill where you know it was something you ate (in my unfortunate case it was a deli salad).

By 11pm I was absolutely wrecked as my body took the majority of decision making away from me and did everything it was capable of to expel whatever kind of toxin I’d inadvertently ingested.

Literally the only thing you can do in a situation like that is don’t stray far from your commode and don’t let yourself get dehydrated. So I became laser focused on those two things, and those two things alone to get through the night.

I have to admit that I am one of those people who tries to extrapolate good in just about any situation, but admittedly that mostly occurs in hindsight, not while whatever event is going down. I’m honestly still pretty laid up from the past 2 days (writing this on Thursday evening) but at least I no longer have a fever, my stomach and intestines have calmed down a lot and I’ve managed to eat a few bits of food.

The first thing I need to get out of the way is I am absolutely done with deli salads. Maybe salads altogether. Even if it has been 20 years, the last time I had food poisoning (which was not even as bad as this bout) was a salad. That’s more pure hindsight than finding good in a bad situation though.

When I got to the tipping point on Tuesday evening, I realized that there was no getting around it.

There was reasoning it away.

There was no delaying it for a “better” time when I was more prepared to deal with it.

I had zero say in the matter.

My whole focus was just surviving that first night and what my body was going through to expel the invaders.

Something like this also seems much worse when it’s just you, alone and facing what ever it is on your own. Oh sure, I have the cats, who definitely knew something was very wrong, but I mean another human there to console you and monitor the situation.

It makes you feel utterly helpless. Except for the actually being sick part, there were definitely some parallel emotions that I had during Mario’s last few days. It was happening, and there was nothing to be done about it.

And now I wonder if this is something unique to the widowed experience … where you seem to be able to easily draw parallels like that?

What was the good to come out of it? Well since I’m not fully recovered the only thing I can come up with is I’m glad my body was able to do its thing and that I had the wherewithal to not let myself get dehydrated.

I can joke that I’d been wanting a “schedule reset”, but this is definitely not the reset I was hoping for. I pretty much did nothing except visit the bathroom, feed cats, drink fluids, and lay in bed for a good 30 hours. Today was the first day I was up and about a little more. Hopefully I can fully recover through the weekend.