My days in hell

Firstly, Happy Birthday… err… you-know-who-you-are! I know you guys expressed concern over seeing your names on my blog, so there you go. Makes you sound abit like Voldemort though.
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Alas! After a lifetime of being brought up on expired foods and years of poisoning my friends with expired foods, I experienced a food poisoning episode that I believe would make me extremely careful about the food I consume. For good.

On 16 April 2005, I went for one of those barbecue buffets thingy at Marina. It wasn’t planned because as a rule I don’t like to go for those as I don’t trust my own cooking. So how did I end up going there with a guy who thinks that cooking vegetables is dunking them in hot water for three seconds? Well we were waiting at the bus stop when this aunty just shoved some flyers into my hands. They were advertising a $10 dollar BBQ buffet with live prawns, we were just commenting that it seems like quite a good deal when the aunty said, “ok? If yes, then we go now.� We looked up, bewildered, and saw a van from the restaurant waiting to pick up customers. Highly amused, we decided to give the aunty some business for their effort.

On the whole, I thought the dinner was quite bearable, and my barbequed sotong very very delicious. There was only one live prawn though, which we immediately dubbed ‘Prawnie, the prawn which refused to die’. When Liang lifted up the cover, Prawnie jumped 20feet (ok I might be exaggerating here) into the air and landed with a splat on the table. And whenever Liang tried to capture it, it will jump away. We finally managed to put it back into its ‘home’ after 15minutes of prawn catching. Liang wanted to dump Prawnie into the boiling tom yam soup as revenge but I wouldn’t let him because I got the impression that when you pour live prawns into hot water, you’ll hear a high pitch ‘eeeeeeeee’ sound which sounds like the prawns shrieking in pain. (I dunno where I got the impression from but I’m still sane ok) So I thought it best to suffocate Prawnie. After 30 minutes in an airtight container, it was still waving its limbs feebly. In desperation, I suggested that we (by we, I mean Liang) pluck off its limbs so that it would die from the pain but he just gave me a disgusted look. We then cooked some of Prawnie’s dead comrades which were also in his ‘home’ to hint to him that he’s going to die soon anyway so might as well give up trying to live. (this was my idea of course) Finally when I went off to get more food, Liang couldn’t take it anymore (I think he got hungry) and dumped Prawnie into the soup. He also kindly informed me that there weren’t any weird sounds at all. I stared at the soup in apprehension, half expecting Prawnie to crawl out of it like Sadako, but it became thoroughly cooked and dead. We decided to break Prawnie into small pieces to slowly enjoy him.

After that sadistic meal, it’s no wonder that I went home that night with a horrible stomachache. And on Sunday, Liang kept complaining that there was a bubbly feeling in his stomach so we thought it must have been Prawnie wreaking havoc as revenge.

I thought that was the end of that, but on Monday morning, I was woken up by a jaw-clenching, gut-wrenching pain in my stomach which was a thousand times worse than any pain I’ve ever experienced, and trust me I’ve had a lot of tummyaches in my lifetime eating the food I have at home. That was quickly followed by a trip to the toilet and THAT was followed by my vomiting in the sink. Then I began my days in hell. I had diarrhoea about 8-9 times in the space of just 3 hours and vomited at least thrice. In fact, it was so bad I actually suspected cholera. I shan’t be too explicit as I don’t wanna taint my lovely blog but I guess it’s suffice to say: rice-water. When I told my doctor, he didn’t believe me but told me to call him that night if I wasn’t any better so he could admit me into hospital for the drip. I thought, “Have a big fat needle stuck in my veins 24 HOURS OF THE DAY??? No way in hell I’m going to allow THAT!� Which was why even though I was still vomiting on Thursday and my parents were begging me to go to the hospital, I refused to budge. It wasn’t till Friday when I got a morsel of my brain back that I realized the nausea, vomiting and dizziness were probably due to the ofloxacin I’ve been taking. Please, if you’re a doctor, at least have the good sense to warn your patients about the side effects. It’s a good thing I still have abit of my Microb in me, some other patient would have been in the hospital subjected to… THE DRIP (scary music: dum dum DUM) by now.

On Tuesday night, while I was trying to ingest the tasteless, odourless, ingredientless, sauceless plain white porridge my mum made me, Liang called to tell me he’s downstairs and he wanted to come visit me. I was cranky, dizzy, puking and laosai-ing every once in a while and I haven’t bathed in two days. So I just plain refused to let him up. And there was nothing he could do about it because security is tight and he wouldn’t climb up 26 floors (unlike some ‘other people’). He called again in ten minutes saying he had something for me, so I sent my mum down with the explicit instructions to only let him up if he bought me my favourite tom yam soup. My mum came back up with a huge ugly plastic bag and no Liang so I was about to resign myself to eating the porridge when I noticed my mum was trying hard not to laugh. She then pulled out a bouquet of flowers from the plastic bag and I giggled too. I just found it hilarious that he had to ask for a carrier bag for flowers. It was a huge bouquet of forget-me-nots and three pink tulips and one white one. They looked like how I was feeling: forlorn. The tulips were sort of drooping sadly over the shorter forget-me-nots.

When he described the scene at the florist, I had to admit it was pretty funny. He dashed into the florist and declared,� I want pink tulips!� And the florist said,� Neh!�, pointing to a bunch pink tulips right in front of him. He said,“ Ok, I want them all.� And then realized his mistake when he couldn’t afford them. I also had no idea that tulips were so expensive. Actually, I still have no idea how expensive they were. He told me it cost him $1.50…per petal. I think I shall tell him that I made a mistake and my favourite flowers are pink lilies instead. They’re cheaper, right?

It was Sandy’s birthday on Friday so my dad suggested giving the flowers to her instead. Sigh, men!