I’ve never, ever, ever had a 24-hour stomach flu. At least not that I can recall. I’ve heard about them, sure, and always thought, hey, what a lucky break. I mean, sick for 24 hours, that’s it? What a joke. Ha. Ha. Ha. Until I learned that the 24-hour stomach flu, wicked as it is, manages to compound three or four days of normal flu pain and misery into its own shortened lifespan. It’s tricky like that.

Or maybe it was just food poisoning. I don’t know. I’m better now. But it sure was weird.

Because with the 24-hour stomach flu…

you start from massive, huge, horrible stomach pain and total nausea – so much so that a quick Web search has you convinced you’re having an aneurysm or triplets

you move quickly on to paranoia and disorientation, the nausea and pain somehow persisting in the background

you leave work, wondering how you even got there in the first place, sweating even though you’re underdressed for the freezing chill in the air

you lay on the couch, crawl under a quilt, and pass directly out, a stream of True Hollywood Stories pouring out of the television

you wake up three hours later, barely focusing your gauzy eyes upon Corey Haim’s bright, hopeful smile

you drink ginger ale, never realizing how good it was before

you alternate ten minutes on, ten minutes off, between cold sweats and hot flashes

you swear you’re never having Pad Thai again

you fall asleep sometime and wake up sometime later to morning

you feel better, and you think of a joke:

A guy gets the 24-hour stomach flu. Not sure what it is, he makes an appointment with his doctor for the next afternoon. The next day, he goes in for the appointment, his doctor looks him over, and he says, ‘Well, you look just fine. Can you describe how you felt?’

The guy replies, ‘I…I can’t remember. It…it all happened too fast.’