Food Poisoning

Yesterday was a milestone in our young marriage: I witnessed O. vomiting for the first time.

On Saturday night, we had taken my parents out to dinner at a local Mexican place they've started going to recently. The food was good and we admired the Diego Rivera art (posters, but the images still spoke) on the brightly painted walls. O. downed his entire burrito, a corner of mine that I couldn't finish, a lime soda, and my mother's leftovers.

Home, bed, sleep. Around 2am O. got up, and moaned to me that he felt sick. In the morning, he still had a stomache ache, but we made it to the 8am service at church (albeit a bit late, but that was my fault) for this great sermon. We intended to drive up to San Francisco after that and explore Golden Gate Park, which O. hasn't seen. But since we hadn't had time for breakfast before church, we stopped at home to eat.

It was very fortunate that we did stop, and that we lingered, because O.'s condition deteriorated rapidly. After he threw up violently, we had to conclude that SF was out of the question for that day. O. ended up lying on the couch most of the day, looking and sounding miserable, and arousing all my affection and compassion. I read him 40 or so pages of Roald Dahl's charming book The BFG, which we had started the previous day. He ran a fever and worried that he wouldn't be able to take our scheduled flight (8:15am tomorrow).

He ended up swallowing a couple of my parent's traditional Chinese stinky pills (no obvious effect on him, but my mom says he should have had four, the full dose), and two or three cloves worth of minced garlic, one clove at a time. Thank God, in the morning he was all better, and was able to enjoy our last day here.

O. has seen me vomit from motion sickness a few times already, but yesterday's episode was the first time I saw him reduced to that level of physical discomfort. I would never wish it on him again, but on the bright side, I do feel a little closer and more intimate with him now. Even food poisoning can have a silver lining.