In case you missed my post from a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been experiencing “digestive distress” for nearly a month now. “Digestive distress” is a polite way to say “stomach cramping and explosive diarrhea.” When I first began experiencing symptoms on July 19 Susan and I thought it might have been food poisoning from a local sushi bar, but as we walked backwards through the calendar I remembered I’d had tacos (with lettuce) from Taco Bell while visiting West Virginia, one of the five states the outbreak of Cyclospora has been traced back to.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “it’s all fun and games until you have diarrhea so many times a a day and so many days in a row that you legitimately begin to worry about dehydration”, but that’s what happened. Also, it’s fairly unlikely Lincoln ever said that.

After nearly 10 days of bathroom nonsense, Susan called our doctor and requested a prescription for antibiotics that would kill the parasite. The message was intercepted by our doctor’s nurse who said… no. We would have to make an appointment first, which would be later that week, or we could schedule an online visit. We chose online, and a nice doctor from Missouri said I would have to provide a stool sample before they could prescribe me anything.

Because this is a public blog and you might be eating right now I won’t completely describe this process. I’ll only tell you that it involved a plastic bucket, four medicine bottles, and a plastic spoon. The only direction we got was “make sure it’s diarrhea” which, I assure you, was not a problem. Susan was involved in this process more than she wanted to be and after delivering the four vials of fun to the local doctor’s office we were informed that, whoops, there were supposed to be five. We were given the option to either provide another sample within the next three hours, or the other four vials would be thrown out and I would have to start all over. Fortunately, and again I am being delicate here, providing another sample was not a problem. I probably could have done it there in the room.

Did I mention one of the vials had to be frozen? We had to put one of them in our freezer. I can’t imagine that affects the testing at all. That has to be some kind of inside joke down at the ol’ poop lab. “Let’s see what else we can get them to do, hah hah. Let’s see if we can get them to put it next to their food, tee hee.”

Now if you’re like me you might imagine in the back of this lab there’s some guy with a microscope and hopefully gloves ready to sift through vials of my poop and solve this mystery, but no. They send it off and tell you they’ll have the results in either a day or a week.

It took a week.

Fast forward to August 5, when I got the following information around noon:

And let me tell you this. The length of time between when I ate lettuce from Taco Bell and the time I received this message was approximtely 26 days. The mount of time between receiving this email and getting a call from the Oklahoma Health Department was less than an hour. Oh, they got real interested after that. The main reason they were calling was to try and track possible sources of infection and when we told them I’d eaten soft tacos with lettuce rom Taco Bell in West Virginia they were like yeah welp case closed.

That same day I was finally sent a prescription for Bactrim, an antibiotic that should neutralize the parasite. I can see why they would not just give it to me in the first place because it cost 91 cents at Walgreens. You can’t just go handing out antibiotics to people who have had diarrhea for nearly a month with prices like that.

Along this journey there have been rounds of stool hardener followed by stool softener and so no, things are not yet back to normal. For three weeks now I’ve made it a point to locate the nearest restroom wherever I am, and to all those toilets, I apologize. I believe I have a 10 day supply of the medicine. We’re on day 3 and I’m really looking forward to day 10.