Ummm… This is a bit grotesque, so if you don’t like graphical bodily stuff, maybe skip what follows. Anyway, someone gifted me really expensive and rare cheese recently. By that point, I had been eating less animal products, so I had forgotten my body couldn’t really handle dairy…
My friend and I tried it and it was absurdly tasty. We kept on eating, grating, eating, grating… In a single sitting, my friend and I ate the whole thing.
Oh boy, what a mistake. My belly ached. I was bloated. ‘Not a problem’, I thought, ‘tomorrow morning everything will be okay’. My lactase-abundant friend left and I went to sleep.
Middle of the night. I woke up. Nausea. Dizziness. I just had to go go the toilet. I ran. Oh boy, my stomach wasn’t happy with me. At all.
I figured I’d wait and see if this ended up being serious. It could be temporary. Except, I had to go to the toilet again, and again, and again.
“OK, snek_boi, you need electrolytes. You won’t die from lactose intolerance-induced dehydration. I refuse”. So I went to the store, got the electrolytes, and chugged them as I came back. Alright. Time to sleep, again.
I managed to sleep, except when I woke up I still felt nauseous. I went to the bathroom. This time, (TRIGGER WARNING, GROTESQUE) I was pooping radioactive water. It was bright yellow, almost like Powerade or Gatorade or something like that. Wtf.
I took out my phone to see if I should go to the hospital. Turns out, if you eat too much cheese, it goes through a whole process as your body tries to decompose it. The very last step is pooping bile, which is secreted in an attempt to digest the fat in cheese.
Knowing about that whole ‘cheese digestion process’, I guessed I wouldn’t die anytime soon. I just sat on the toilet, drinking my electrolyte solution, contemplating, contemplating my poor decisions, contemplating the wondrous complexity of chemistry and biology, contemplating the fragility of human life and good gut health.