My Offal Bout With Shigella Ranked As The Worst Pain in the Arse

Two women (Ziona and Susan) plus your truly, which trio befriended each other from the Thursday night contra dance. Aforementioned women identified via first name basis (since their sir nom de plume unknown at this juncture), and yours truly linkedin via above said social venue.

This piece of information mentioned since that innocuous site (Summit Presbyterian Church at Green and Westview Streets within Mount Airy, Pennsylvania) essentially served as the figurative starting point per the following anecdote.

Though almost thirty years ago, my memory easily jogged asper the unforeseen brush with death. Innocence and naïveté twin coeval factors, tangentially contributed to the agonizing ordeal.

Ask me what I ate for breakfast this morning, and ye will receive a blank stare!

Turn back the clock, circa approximately July fourth holiday nineteen hundred and eighty seven.

The Rainbow Family Gathering held in Cheoah National Forest just outside Robbinsville western North Carolina, and the farthest south the clandestine group congregated.

Among the estimated 12, 700 attendees (one of whom included yours truly), more than fifty percent of the sprawling masses contracted the near fatal outbreak of shigellosis.

Sanitation in the expansive campsite ranked as poor to non-existent. This absence of proper hygiene provided opportunities thru contaminated food, water and person to person contact.

Widespread transmission of the very opportunistic disease caused by Shigella sonnei, resistant to ampicillin, tetracycline, and trimethoprimsulfamethoxazole; the rapacious organism categorized as colicin type 9, and contained a 90-kilobase plasmid, not found in non-contagious related strains.

Misery loves company, and this epidemic plagued the infected with unrelenting diarrhea and general lower gastrointestinal debilitation.

Unsure how this then late twenty something singular male managed to weather the microbial onslaught, which rendered me prone to a doubled over spate of being lobbed and hamstrung re: asper the lower gastro intestinal tract, and incessant severe loss of nutriment vis a vis thru rectal a steady state quintessentially unable to nourish an already slim body.

Upon relieving chronic purging from the sphincter muscle, the sensation to expel countless times thereafter explained the loss of weight.

Whence returning home (at that time 724 Level Road, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, 19426, this ghostly appearance of mine immediately alarmed, discerned, and gauged family members to schedule me for immediate medical intervention.

After being examined (what little flesh remained of what resembled a Holocaust Concentration camp victim), the physician could offer no pharmacological remedy.

As the days of my life passed under bedside and medical watch of mother (who worked as a licensed practical nurse, yet could do little or nothing to halt her own demise from metastatic carcinoma viz ovarian/uterine cancer), the gradual full recovery took place.

Though this now middle aged married male with two near grown lovely daughters never entertained to participate in these yearly conclaves (which site for 2017 slated to be somewhere over the Rainbow within Oregon), he shares the economic, democratic core bedrock affinity with an ideology of peace, harmony, and respect toward all living things minus Shigella!

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