On
average, I get sick about twice a year: once in the spring as the seasons are changing,
and once again in the fall, when the Grammy nominees are announced. So last
week, as God-awful songs such as “Fancy,” and “All about that Bass,” we’re
nominated for Record of the Year, I came down with a mild cold. Now, my problem
with getting sick isn’t the illness itself—there tend to be treatments for most
things these days—but rather my personal obsession with trying to figure out
how I got sick in the first place. For some reason, my mind can’t simply accept
that I “caught” a cold. I need to
know its point of origin. I suddenly become some sort of lousy medical detective,
like Dr. Gregory House from the Fox TV show House,
but with absolutely no professional training. Regardless of my lack of medicinal
knowledge, I always try to figure out the cause of my illness. Was it that
pizza I ate on Tuesday evening? Perhaps the “chef” didn’t wash their hands. Or
maybe I got it from one of those elderly folks that I deal with at my day job?
But I apply hand sanitizer about a hundred times a day, so that seems unlikely.
Maybe it was from…
“Maybe it was from that cookie you
ate,” my girlfriend, Katelin, chimes in.
“What cookie?”
“You know exactly what cookie I’m
talking about. The one you found in the envelope.”
Oh, that cookie. A good detective must not leave any stone unturned, so
let us go back a few days and look at a conversation I had with Katelin
concerning this said cookie:
December, 2014, a Tuesday
Evening, around 10 p.m.
“You did what?”
“I ate a cookie that I found at
work.”
“What do you mean you ‘found’ it?”
“It was in a drawer.”
“It was just lying in a drawer?”
“It was inside an envelope.”
“What kind of envelope?”
“A normal white envelope, the kind you
use for mailing letters.”
“So, let me get this straight: you
found a cookie, in an envelope, in a drawer, and you decided to eat it. What if
somebody poisoned it?”
“That’s why I only ate one of the
cookies, even though there were two in the envelope. Plus, what kind of sick
person would poison cookies and then just leave them for someone to find?”
“What kind of sick person would eat random
cookies that they found in an envelope!?”
Katelin brought up a valid point, and
it got me thinking: perhaps it was
this “found food” that made me sick. But to be sure, I needed more evidence. I
couldn’t examine the cookie since I had already eaten it, but I could look back
into my archives and see if there were any other times that I had eaten “found
food” and then examine the consequences of those actions. I suddenly became
some sort of historical detective, like Lilly Rush on that CBS show, Cold Case. Let’s travel back to the last
time I ingested some “found food”:
February,
2012, a Sunday, late night, actually, early Monday morning, 1 a.m.
Myself and four other twenty-something year old men had
just finished a long night of drinking beers and riding children’s bicycles down
very steep hills at incredible speeds. As one could expect, those said
activities resulted in an unparalleled hunger taking over the depths of our
exhausted bodies. We rolled up to a local pizza shop carrying the combined appetite
of a wolf pack in winter, but the doors had just been locked for the night. Too
late, but wait, one of the trustafarians I was with knew someone who worked
there. “At the end of the night,” he said, “they always throw the leftover
pizza out. It’s still good and all; we just have to get it out of the garbage.”
So, like a horde of urban raccoons, we rummaged
through the trash and left with about ten pounds of cold pizza. Since I had
cash in my pocket, the intelligent thing would have been to simply head to
another eating establishment and purchase some fresh food, but I was caught up
in a classic case of group-think and having one of those “When in Rome”
moments. (After all, this did happen in Portland, Oregon, where young people go
to retire, and we all know that retired folks eat out of the garbage on a
regular basis.) So, I ate the pizza. And it was good. One slice in particular
was more impressive than the others—some sort of Mexican pizza covered in nacho
cheese. (When I returned to the same pizza shop a few weeks later, during
business hours, I was quite shocked to find out that they didn’t offer a pizza with
nacho cheese sauce). Anyway, to make a short story shorter, I became extremely
ill following the garbage pizza incident, developing one of the worst colds I’ve
ever had in my life.
So, there we have it, case closed, fine
detective work leads to another mystery solved: eating “found food” can cause illness.
Who would have thought? Luckily, as I preformed a search and seizure on the
medicine cabinet in my bathroom, I discovered an old bottle of cold syrup that
was a few years past the expiration date…
Next
Time on Penfold, Pointless Detective:
Does medicine really expire?
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