food poisoning? or bad reaction to meds? or?

[selizastew]

Hi,

I apologize in advance for the gory details of this post!

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a friend's place for dinner and ate shrimp, risotto and salad.  My nose was starting to get stuffed up from her cat, so she gave me a few tablets of a chinese allergy remedy she had been recommended by a TCM practitioner. She takes it and it works great for her.  

I was feeling a bit queasy a couple hours later and slept fitfully with uncomfortable stomach cramps. By the time the sun came up, I began having violent vomiting and diarrhea. I seemed to expel everything that was in me (retching long after I had thrown up everything in my stomach) and the last couple of times I went to the toilet, there was some blood that came out and nothing else.  I had bad stomach pains all day and was totally wrecked, exhausted, for the next couple of days.  The day after all this happened, I didn't pass any stool, but passed what looked like a big glob of mucus that was deep red all the way through, about the size of my thumb, along with a little bit of more liquidy blood. I've never seen anything like it and it freaked me out....I was going to go to the doctor, but after that I actually felt way better, had no more bleeding, and my digestion went back to normal.  

None of the other people at dinner got sick.  

I'm fine now and have had none of the symptoms since. But I was just reading a bit about colonic conditions and was worried that the bleeding was something I should have been way more scared about. Has anyone had experience with that kind of thing?

thanks for any info.

[Jaybay]

The cause of food poisoning is very difficult to pin down.  Some organisms can live in the gut for a month before you show symptoms, so it's not necessarily the last thing you ate that caused the problem.  Sometimes only a spoonful of a dish carries bacteria (like one shrimp or a spoon of potato salad) resulting in only one person getting sick instead of everyone who ate it.

It does sound like a food poisoning episode.  I've experienced it once myself and NEVER want to go through that again!  Since the blood in your stool has calmed down now, it sounds like your intestinal lining was just extremely irritated from whatever bacteria it was that made you ill.  The mucous just means that there was no stool left in your intestines.  Sounds like you're just fine now, so enjoy!  :-)

[selizastew]

Yeah, I definitely don't want to ever go through that again! It has made me way more sympathetic to anyone who's ever had food poisoning.

Thanks, Jaybay!