Mirth and Woe: Still Ill

Still Ill

What's the most ill you've ever been?

I've been fairly lucky with my health in that I've never found myself in hospital for anything more serious than a dental operation and, of course, to allow a complete stranger to plunge a blunt fruit knife into my groin until the jizz supply dried up. A 'vasectomy' they call this. 'Havin' a laugh', I would counter. I only went in to have my wanker's cramp seen to.

No, I have never been horribly, life threateningly ill, not even following a couple of gallons of heavy ale and chasers which resulted in a New Year of sweating, puking, crapping and weeing all at once for three days solid. Self-inflicted doesn't really count.

Not that the self-inflicted excuse gets me off the hook for the worst I have ever felt in my life, ever.

It was this bad: terrible. Really, really terrible. I bet you've had worse, though.

I remember it well. I had been to some bloody awful first division football match in which Reading had been roundly thrashed by Ipswich Town, and on the way back to the railway station I had decided on something to eat that would lift my dampened spirits. It was a Big Mac and large fries from a certain fast food chain that rhymes with FuckingAwfulCrapDonalds. I wolfed it all down on the 1742 to Twyford, and within an hour of stepping through my front door, I was bent double with pain and begging for death.

"Frep!" went my bottom, a portent of the horrors to come.

"Frep!" it went again.

"FreeeeEEEeeEEEEeep!" Oh.

I believe we burned the trousers in the garden in the end, just to make sure. Although we should have just nuked 'em from orbit.

Before long I was simultaneously crapping through the eye of a needle and bowking rich brown vomit, firstly into a bucket, and once that was brimming with something terrible, into the hand basin. Anything that I ate or drank rapidly came out again, only converted to some sort of green mush containing dead mice and body parts.

I may have eaten rhubarb and sausages at some stage because I remember both featuring heavily.

This only seemed to encourage the cycle of awfulness, but God, I needed to put something back in before I died.

My mother, ever the attentive nurse, came up trumps with a diarlyte, a drink designed - and I quote - "to replace lost liquids and minerals in those suffering from the effects of diahoerra."

It tasted like seawater, and it probably was.

"Yaaaaaaaaaaarch!"

This lasted for three days, after which only dust came out. On the bright side, I had lost well over a stone in weight, and despite a rather pasty complexion and an unnatural body odour, I must say I was looking pretty bloody buff.

"Never again", I said to myself, and I vowed that I would never, ever step inside a FuckingAwfulCrapDonalds ever again.

I switched to Burger King, and was bowking rich, brown vomit again within a week.

That is the most ill I have ever been. I don't know I'm born.