Time for Baby-ban?

Pain. Now.

Yes, after being "mentally ill" enough to uwork several days last week, Monday finds me achey. For real.

The morning (4:30 a.m.) led me to believe that the chain of events started with an old Swanson "Mexican" TV dinner I copped from the work freezer Sunday. I should be more specific, re: stealing. The frost-beans, rice, "tamales," etc. belonged to a co-worker who hasn't been here since, umm, November.

No one cleans things out here; in fact, I removed a box of donuts from the counter today after a period of three weeks. As you know, donuts are trash after three hours, much less 21 days, and the box, how charming, was stuck to the Formica. Some of it still is. Ah, sugared grease, who knew your cementing powers?

Back to yesterday's frozen dinner binge, there was only one part of the "beef" things that tasted "funny," and being a child of the post-irradiation age, fully aware of the miracle of preservatives found in these sodium-rich meals of convenience, I thought nothing of the little bite I took.

Yeah, I ate the rice part and the non-scary meat sections. And now I'm sick.

Retribution for my working on a Sunday (see famous commandments, number 3)? At any rate, it has that secular kind of guilt-irony written all over it:

"If I had been at work when I was 'supposed' to be, none of this scavenging would have happened and I wouldn't be operating as a parasite host, etc."

Parasites don't care, and there was a pretty good chance that my scavenging self was going to eat the thing anyway. I had already had some Budget Gourmet pasta with three "chicken" cubes and some broccoli dust amid the white sauce. . . .

However, as food poisoning goes, this is just going on too long!

Unless. . . could this be a real Mexican-style "don't eat the tacos from the town square street vendors" illness that Swanson has been able to capture and market to gringos under special contract for some kind of "gotcha" factor?

. . . the buyer of the cardboard-stored meal was Italian, though, so as a "racist," I'm confused. She seemed healthy, but then again, she was 20 and I'm clearly not.

Pain continues. Aches all over the place, which I feel have nothing to do with my colon.

So, if it's not food poisoning, then. . . .baby germs!

These days, every time I find myself placed around the under-four set for any period of time, I come down with some horrible reminder that my genes, while not being passed on to anyone at the moment, are weak in the face of today's new, youthful viruses.

I was around "people with kids" Friday and Saturday, so I can't blame any bitty one in particular, though one already has a record with me and my pain.

Whine, whine. Makes me think, though, "what am I doing with my 'healthy' years?"

When you are sick, everything else is a huge challenge. I need to develop some coping skills. . .I'm so used to being "blue" and/or "depressed" (yes, I am using even more reservational and hedging quotes!) that the onslaught of physical unwellbeing is really hard to compartmentalize. In fact, it makes me bluer.

Not that I'm blue today. Just hot and cold and then overheated and then shivering.

I am not compelled to call the "sick? think it might be something you ate?" line, though.

No digging past the fossil donuts to retrieve meat-evidence or a box code or whatever for me!