75%

 

I wish I wasn't rly sick! Actually, I'm a lot better. The worst seems to be over, and I was able to sleep on the couch for a couple of hours (I dozed to the comforting sounds of CNN's convention analysis), and then a nice hot shower made me feel better. I was thinking I was up to about 85%, but I talked to Mom before they leave on a short vacation, and I didn't have a whole lot of energy even for talking. So I'll take it back down to 75%.

 

I had that feverish feeling, with a cold sweat and chills, but I was finally able to keep down some of my diet green tea. I was glad, because I was so damn thirsty! I feel like I've been able to rehydrate fairly well. I also think it's a good sign that I'm really famished--not surprising, because everything I ate yesterday is long gone!--and I hope I'll be able to eat some Humanwich tonight. I'm starved!

 

And thanks for all the kind wishes and "get wells." You guys are peaches.

 

In my entry about the Hot Pockets recall, a couple of people mentioned Totino's Pizza Rolls. Full disclosure time: I totally love those things. I don't eat them often, but sometimes if Ken is on a business trip, I get a craving. I just toss 'em in the microwave, so they're probably especially disgusting, and then I dip them in yellow mustard.

 

You can tell I'm hungry--I'm thinking how good those sound right now!

 

Ziggy mentioned that there was a food recall in Canada, too, due to the bacterium Listeria. Ziggy wondered how safe our food really is. That's not easy to answer. I would say that for the  most part, things are quite safe. There are plenty of quality checks in place, FDA standards, etc. Most of us will go our entire lives without getting a case of food poisoning from packaged foods (restaurants and potlucks are a different story). But when one batch or lot number of something gets contaminated with Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, etc., it can make a whole lot of people sick. We used to see outbreaks fairly frequently. That doesn't account for "foreign material" such as that found in the Hot Pockets, either.

 

To me, sometimes it all seems like a crap shoot [pun intended!]. While you can be careful by not eating too many processed and packaged foods and buy as much fresh as possible, you can get E. coli from contaminated beef and lettuce, Cyclospora (a parasite) from raspberries, Salmonella from uncooked eggs, and Cryptosporidium (another parasite) from your freakin' water supply! If you think about it too much, it will make you paranoid and turn you into another Howard Hughes, walking around the house with Kleenex boxes on your feet. I try not to worry about it, and most of these things are self-limiting, anyway. You'll feel miserable for a while, but it will eventually get over it. It's a bigger problem for those who have compromised immune systems, and they will usually need some kind of treatment, sometimes just supportive therapy like making sure they don't get too dehydrated.

 

The big question during the dental torture scene in "Marathon Man" is "Is it safe?" I can't answer that question anymore than Dustin Hoffman could.

Tags: Food poisoning, Totinos Pizza Rolls, Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman