Poisoner

Right now Scott is fighting what might be the flu (I hope it is not) and he is making me very grateful that I have had the H1N1 vaccine. I was lucky to get it; a friend of my mother’s works at a doctor’s office up in Laconia, NH, and, back in October, told me that they had plenty of doses. I took the trip up there and waited in no line whatsoever to get the shot, which took just a few seconds. A weird thing happened that night, though: I woke up at 3 AM (not unusual nowadays) with an incredible chill—I could not stop shaking and my teeth were chattering; I could not get warm. Then I started sweating. This all lasted about a half hour, then it was gone and I was fine. A reaction to the shot? I remember at the time thinking that I had made a horrible mistake, and that somehow I was getting the swine flu because of the vaccine.
In my family we are pretty dramatic about illness, and sometimes for good reason. My brother contracted mono as an infant and was sick for a long time, and I used to get fevers so high that I would hallucinate and have conversations with people who were not there. Admittedly, there was something oddly calming about seeing things, and I remember in one fever dream seeing a marble go around a track on the ceiling, rolling into a hole until another would pop up, like a pinball game.

I also allegedly poisoned my father with mercury when I was a small child. While my mother went to night class, he babysat us (yes, we considered it that, even though he lived with us, mostly because his powers of supervision were sorely lacking) and one time I was playing with a thermometer that suddenly broke. How I did not get poisoned I do not know, but he later ate an orange at that same table and apparently got some mercury on the orange. I don’t remember any of this after that point, but when my mother got home she found him doubled over in pain and called a nurse friend of hers who indicated that it sounded like mercury poisoning. Maybe the mercury is to blame for the high level of idiopathic autoimmune antibodies in my blood (that no doctor has been able to discern why they are there or what they are doing—all they know is that I have them in quantities equal to women with full-blown lupus, but I do not have any known autoimmune disease) but this is just a far-fetched theory.

Maybe all of this is the reason I am terrified of eating food that has gone bad and will throw things out at the slightest provocation, something that both my husband and father find troubling (both have actually had food poisoning and continue to ignore or shrug aside “sell by” or expiration dates.) Whenever I am at my parents’ house I have to check the expiration dates on everything in the fridge and then ask when things were first opened. My father had a jar of pickles in there last summer that expired in 1996 ("They're still good! They're pickles!"). Being pregnant has only made it worse—if I eat the wrong thing, or something not on the ever-growing “do not consume while pregnant” list, I could poison my baby, so I am vigilant. I thought it might get better when the baby is born, but at my breastfeeding class I was handed a list of foods not to consume while breastfeeding. On the up side, I was also handed a free sample of these strips called “milkscreen” that bills itself as a “home test for alcohol in breast milk.” It’s like a breathalyzer for breast milk—you drink a glass of wine, wait an hour, then see if the alcohol has cleared out of your system before you nurse. If only they made those for every potential hazard I might consume, I would be all set.