Highs and Lows

Life has its ups and downs, its highs and lows. Sometimes the highs are splendid. Sometimes the lows are truly dreadful.

The dinner party Casie (my wife, for any new readers) and I had in honour of her birthday Saturday fits snugly into the splendidly high category.

My head buried in the toilet bowl a few hours later, vomiting up the meal I’d prepared for our guests that night, takes it place among my most dreadful lows.

It was 5 am and my third trip to the washroom. The previous two trips had gone undetected by Casie, who was passed out on the couch in the living room. On my third trip, she happened to be washing up, getting ready to finally go to bed.

“Hi sweetie,” she said as I bolted into the washroom.

“Oh, sweetie!” she exclaimed as I got into position for another wretched series of gastric convulsions.

“What’s the matter, did you do shots?”

“No,” I gasped, drooling into the rancid bowl. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

In fact, I was convinced I had food poisoning – worse, that I had given food poisoning to all of my guests. I haven’t thrown up from drinking for almost a decade, and, as a later inspection of my one-third full vodka bottle proved, that night was not among my most valiant alcoholic efforts.

The dread that I had inflicted the awful nausea I was experiencing on 15 other people and the humiliation I would surely endure (who would eat my food ever again?) had me at absolute rock-bottom.

Or so I thought, until Casie decided to flush the toilet while I was still in mid-spew.

Numerous studies, some of which were likely quite costly, have shown that each time a toilet is flushed, minute particles of water and waste are sprayed upwards and dispersed throughout the washroom.

A great deal of money would have been saved had these researchers simply suspended their faces mere inches above the surface of the water and then flushed, since I came to the same unmistakeable conclusion quite unexpectedly.

“It smelled,” Casie later explained. No doubt.

As it turns out, it wasn’t food poisoning or a vicious hangover, but some kind of stomach bug that also felled my neighbour and two of his kids on the same day. I’m still getting over it, which is why I haven’t posted much this week.

All I know is that if the next high matches this low, it’s going to be spectacular.