Been having another of my sleepy days today, filled with deep and intense dreams that leave me fumbling and incoherent in those few interludes of waking life that the madness allows. Just long enough for me to drain my bladder, eat a meal, watch a little video, try to rehydrate before the next bout of sweaty, disturbing sleep, and curse my life a little.

So, sorry, folks, but today’s entry is going to be a tad stream-of-consciousness. Oh well, they can’t all be gems of observation, inside, and/or wit.

Last night was difficult. I felt fine (or a least, not sick in any new and unexpected ways) but that was not to last.

I first noticed there was something seriously wrong when I was sitting in McDonald’s having dinner and chatting with my roomie and wonderful friend Joe. We were on our way to the monthly meeting of BCSFA, the British Columbia Science Fiction Society, a local group of nerds like us who get together once a month for a little party.

I usually enjoy it a lot. I know all these people, so I feel relaxed around them, and the discussions are usually quite entertaining and stimulating, with the right mix of intellectual discussion, group business, and silly talk for the likes of yours truly.

So there I was, chatting and noshing with Joe, when I noticed my food tasted wrong. And not just a little wrong, but extremely wrong. My fries tasted bitter and bland, like I was eating cardboard. I could barely taste my Diet Coke at all. It might as well have been slightly dirty tasting carbonated water. And my Big Mac did not taste right at all either.

It was as if every bit of sweetness has been leached from my food, as well as saltiness, leaving everything tasting sour and flat and unpleasant.

This should have been a red flag warning me something dire was wrong, but I often have odd distortions of my sense of taste when my blood sugar is off, so I just chalked it up to that. And I was enjoying my chat with Joe, so I didn’t pay much attention to how off my food tasted and just assumed it would sort itself out when my blood sugar leveled off.

But I was already starting to feel ill.

And as we drove to the event, it only got worse, I knew the signs and dreaded what would come next, because I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome for quite a long time now and so I have been through many of this bad phases before.

Luckily, with experience comes a certain calmness about the whole thing. Having been through it before, I know it will be bad, but that it will pass, and that there is no need to panic about it. That will just make it exponentially worse.

It’s just something I have to endure every couple months or so.

The symptoms are nausea, abdominal cramping, terrible headache, mild dizziness, and an overall feeling of being squeezed like the Hulk’s tube of toothpaste. They are very unpleasant and stressful and at times, outright painful.

When we arrived at the meeting, I was forced to make immediate use of the bathroom. That made me feel somewhat better, as it let me vent some of the intestinal stress I was feeling, but I had a feeling it would get worse before it got better.

When I entered the meeting, I got myself a glass of pineapple juice and used it to take my daily medications. And that was when I truly knew something was wrong, because the pineapple juice, which I normally absolutely love, tasted very bad. It tasted, in fact, like bile. Like it had come up before it went down.

That’s when I knew it was not just a blood sugar abnormality that had made my food taste wrong back at Mcdonald’s.

I tried to keep up with the conversation at the meeting, and part of me was enjoying himself, but another part was feeling increasingly ill. Eventually, I had to zip off t the bathroom once again.

After a second emptying, I began to feel somewhat better. When I have these attacks, it truly feels like there is something poisonous in me that has been working its way through my system for a while and which makes me feel ill when it enters a certain part of my digestive system and makes me feel increasingly bad until it passes out of me completely.

Afterwards, I feel very weak and drained. But I know the worst is over when I stop feeling ill and begin to feel very hungry, which happened on the car ride home.

Oh, but I forgot the best part…. while I was feeling very ill, the folding chair I was sitting on…. folded. My ponderous weight bent it right out of shape. Poor thing could not take my weight.

This is every shy fat man’s nightmare, and it’s why we really do not like sitting on anything less solid than your average love seat. These things are just not mad with hugely obese people in mind.

So there I was, feeling physically ill from my IBS while also mortified with embarassment as all my friends tried to bend the folding chair (which was not ours, but belongs to the building we meet in) back into shape.

No dice. I killed it. With my fatness.

So it’s not a big surprise that I had to sleep all day, and that once I am done here, I will be going right back to sleep. Clearly, I had been through a lot and had expended a lot of stress, and now my body is taking the opportunity created by this stress vacuum to make me catch up on my sleep andmake a hefty payment on my massive slept debt.

I will be back to what I ludicrously refer to as normal soon, I am sure.

But it’s not been a pleasant couple of days.