The annual Long Beach Grand Prix was last week. It’s a biggish deal in these parts. it takes a good two months to prepare the roads and set up the grandstands and do all the prep stuff that having a whole mess of Formula One race cars tearing through city streets requires. Every year we drive bits of the course as they set up, and Chuck goes vrroom, vrroom, and pretends he’s a race car driver. The event itself lasts for three days, and mostly all I notice is a buzz kind of like a very large infestation of bees that goes on and on and on and then blessedly stops (I am not much a rqace car fan, in case you were wondering). Anyway, this year, Chuck wa invited to go down and check out the action on Friday (the free day). He jumped at the offer. But when Friday dawned, Chuck wasn’t feeling too well. The afternoon before he had stopped at Burger King (mistake #1) and ordered some Chicken tenders (mistake #2) as he had missed lunch. By that evening he was feeling a little off, and by Friday morning, though he wouldn’t outright admit it, he didn’t feel well at all. Basically, Mount Vesuvius was erupting in his stomach. He soldiered through the day (mistake #3), getting queasier and queasier as his fellow race attendees drank beer and ate shrimp and other tasty finger foods. By the time I saw him (we were all going to go to dinner on the Queen Mary), he was looking distinctly under the weather. We had a glass of wine (for those keeping track, Chuck’s entire food intake for the day – and mind you he was feeling pretty yucky – was one beer and one glass of wine. *sigh* Sometimes the utter lack of commonsense people exhibit just completely FLOORS me) and I asked him if he wanted to go home. He agreed so quickly I knew he felt bad. We got home and he crashed on the couch for an hour or two befoire heading up to bed. He barely made it out of the bathroom headed toward the bed when he started to collapse. I grabbed him as I could see he was unstable and knew immediately that he was too heavy for me to keep him up, so I just guided him to the floor. once there, he came around and said, “What am I doing on the floor?” Uh-oh. He got into bed for maybe two minutes then immediately got up again and headed into the bathroom where he dumped the contents of his stomach, colon, intestines, and God knows what else into the toilet. He was weak as a kitten afterwards but looked much better and was no longer cold and clammy.
We had to go to a conference the next day, and each day he felt a little better but steered clear of solid food most of Saturday and Sunday. He finally felt completely recovered yesterday. On a positive note, he did manage to lose a couple of pounds, which was nice.
He did manage to take some pix with the new camera.