LIFE BY LOUIS: An encounter with food poisoning

After spending the whole night squatting on a toilet, I paid a visit to the clinic.

“Louis, how can I help you this morning?” the nurse welcomed me with the same generic greetings. Her makeup was still fresh and she looked like a freshly plucked flower. “I want a hug and six million dollars” I mused to myself. 

“My stomach is walking a bit too fast,” I offered. That answer was nowhere in her training manual and I could see that she was on the verge of going losing her patience.

“What brings you here this morning?” she repeated carefully and deliberately.

I looked for the right words, and I managed to tell her that I was ‘driving’.

“You drove yourself here alright but you surely must have a problem you need me to address,”

she crossed her fingers and rubbed her palms together as her patience grew thinner. It was either a slow day for her or she just wanted to terrorize me and harvest an answer from me by way of torture.

I was getting tired of the interrogation so I finally blurted out: “I am having diarrhoea”.

She cocked her head to one side like a person full of pity and understanding. 

What have you been eating was her next question.

“Cake, soda, ugali, lollipop, tomato sauce, another soda and pancakes,” I lied as I deliberately skipped the roadside ‘mutura’ that I was well aware was the cause of my current predicament.

DARK CORNER OF THE ROOM

“Go and lie there and lift up your shirt, I need to examine your stomach,” she requested as she pointed at a rather dark corner of the room with a narrow bed shielded by curtains. 

I was lying on the bed expectantly even before she finished removing some rubber gloves from an expensive dispenser. She placed tender fingers on my belly and pressed gently. She rubbed my navel area and poked inside my ribcage in a way that almost tickled me.

At each point of her examination she looked at my face for any abnormal facial expressions and asked me how I was feeling. She was also kind enough to ask me if I was hurting when she dug her fingers deeper into my tummy. Tears of gratitude welled up in my eyes at that random act of compassion and mercy.

 “Your spleen is tender and a bit inflamed, you could be suffering from food poisoning,” she offered.

Out of all that intrusive examination she did not even notice my six pack! I also thought all spleens were tender.

"It must be the soda, me and sodas are not very good friends."

She totally ignored my pedestrian medical knowledge and retreated to her desk where she quickly scribbled some shorthand writing on the prescription form.

She sent me to the pharmacy. On my way out, I peeped into the nurses’ room and offered her my profuse gratitude for saving my life. 

She smiled sweetly and told me not to get so lost.

I had bigger problems ahead.

One of the fat capsules was for swallowing normally with a glassful of water. That was the easier piece because in my younger days when pandemics ravaged us in Karugo Group of Schools, a hospital visit was not complete until you walked out with a sack full of capsules.

My problem was with the second and by far the bigger capsule. It was supposed to be sneaked in through the less porous Malaba border.

The mechanics to achieve that second feat were just baffling and defeating my weak soul. But sometimes a man has got to do what a man must do, and I am feeling better now.