Life: Don't eat left over food that has sat in the car for more than one hour on a hot day

Since I'm in a confessional mood having acknowledged I was duped by free credit report.com I have to confess a really stupid thing I did that landed me in the hospital.

Southern California weather can be hot and it was recently and I had left over food in my car. Well, I ate it later on and in a matter of hours I was experiencing extreme abdominal cramps. I was balled up like a shrimp on the bathroom floor waiting to either vomit or have diarrhea. After 90 minutes of this, I realized this was NOT good and called my brother to take me to the hospital. Alas, this was 2:30AM Monday morning a few weeks back.

My wonderful brother and sister-in-law came to get me and managed to drag me into the car as I was in so much pain I could barely walk. We drove to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center emergency room where I went in 2004 and 2005 for a bowel obstruction. In 2004, I had surgery for it. In 2005, the MDs decided to see if it would resolve without surgery.

Given my medical history, they were on the lookout for the obstruction. There is little to no dignity in the hospital and when you are sick you really don't care. I can't remember when (4:30 or 5 AM?), but I had 3 bloody diarrhea episodes. From the blood tests and the CAT scan, they concluded I had inflammation of the descending colon. I was admitted into the hospital and was feed by IV to rehydrate me from all the fluid I lost from the diarrheas. On Tuesday, they decided to add IV Flagyl and Levaquin. They cut me loose on Thursday with a prescription for 4 more days of the antibiotics but in tablet form.

My digestive system is still kind of jumpy these days but that is to be expected given the trauma to the colon and the after effects of 7 days of double antibiotic treatment. Key thing I was told to watch for was any bloody stools or off the charts abdominal cramps.

The GI MD thinks it was probably just a very bad case of food poisoning but has scheduled me for a colonoscopy for 2009 to see what is inside my lower GI. The concern is that there is some other issue going on. They aren't likely given my fairly speedy recovery from the episode but they want to check it out nonetheless. Current recommendation is a colonoscopy at age 50 if there isn't a reason to look sooner. So in my case, they felt it was time to look. The list of things they are looking for and hope NOT to find is pretty long.

2009 ... colonoscopy blogging? Ick!