My job requires that I go to Las Vegas at least once a month. Many people are jealous when I tell them this. Personally, I am not a big fan of the place. Let me apologize in advance to any PoopReporters who reside there or visit there and love it. I find Las Vegas to be inauthentic, insincere, and the biggest rip-off since the pet rock. The strip is wall-to-wall tourists and the outlying suburbs are rather bleak.
I am not a gambler in any sense. Once a month I go up there, check into one of the strip hotels, and spend the days covering the company's Vegas markets. I go back to the hotel and crash. No fun for me!
I was just there last week and believe me, if diarrhea were money, I would be the loosest slot around.
I was lucky enough to score a room at the Palms Casino and Resort at a rate I could justify to the bean-counters at corporate. I like the Palms. It caters to an adult crowd, so I didn't have to deal with the discount Vegas riffraff one finds at places like The Stratosphere, where the throngs of white trash country folk bring their kids into the casino. The Palms is expensive and has a rather erotic theme, which keeps the elderly gambling addicts away, too. The rooms are luxurious; the bed in mine was more comfy then the bed at home.
It was with much surprise, then, that when I ordered a thirty-dollar tuna fish sandwich from room service, I noticed a funny taste to it. I had gotten up that morning at four AM to catch my flight and had just finished eight hours at work; my judgment must have been shot, because I was hungry and tired and I just didn't have the sense to stop eating it. Fatigue can really be dangerous. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I considered that this sandwich might give me food poisoning -- but like a robot, I continued to eat it.
I felt fine until about noon the following day.
I was at work, simply walking along, when I started hearing disturbing sounds from my abdomen. Gurgles, whines, and pops seemed to be emanating from my belly as if my bowels were boiling water like a teakettle. I felt no cramps, which was good -- but I did feel a strange looseness in my intestines. I wasn't in panic mode, but I figured I should try and get to a toilet and offload the percolating tar in my colon.
I went to a men's room and was confronted with the last thing a person with fizzing internal liquishit wants to see: an "out of order" sign on the single crapper. The crapper was locked from the inside. I have no idea how they managed it, but they locked it tight.
My bowels are directly connected to my brain, so as soon as I read the sign and tried the door, the bubbly looseness in my guts instantly ramped up. I needed a toilet, fast! I quickly went through my options. I thought about crawling on the floor under the door and trying my luck with the broken toilet. I had no idea what condition the toilet was in. It could have been filled to the brim with the diarrhea of dozens of people; or it could be waterless altogether. Once I was done, though, I would have to deal with the workplace politics of having been the guy who decimated the toilet and would probably be obligated to fix it. I pictured myself red-faced and plunging.
I decided I would hit the street and try to find a nearby store with a toilet. I only hoped I could make it. In addition to feeling loose, my bowels now felt strangely hot. I was breaking out into a nauseated sweat. I hightailed it out of there into the ninety-nine-degree desert sun and saw a CompUSA store next door. I went inside and made a beeline for the toilet.
Unfortunately, there wasn't one. I am sure the staff had one somewhere in the back, but there was no toilet for customers. Damn.
My sphincter was starting to throb. I could literally feel the liquishit sloshing with every step. I left the store doing the duck walk. I could feel the staff giving me the fuzzy eyeball.
Next door to this place was a TJ Maxx. I went in and spied the customer washrooms. I had to run -- that, or subject the store to a fecal supernova.
I entered the most revolting washroom I had seen in a long time. There was shit on the stall walls, piss all over both toilet seats, and no paper towels. I sat my ass down on a pissy seat because I had no time to wipe it up and there were no ass-gaskets. I detonated my explosive diarrhea like a suicide bomber -- and I say "explosive" because it literally exploded out of my anus, splattering the walls of the bowl with hot, brown shrapnel. Foamy tuna-bile hosed out of my body and filled the air with a stink that frightened me. What was going on inside me to make such a stink? Wave after wave of this wretched foam sloshed out. I did a courtesy flush. Not a courtesy to anyone in the washroom, because I was alone -- no, just a self-courtesy flush.
I wiped up with the cheap toilet paper and left, feeling clammy and queasy. My guts were still making noise.
I had only been at work that day for three hours, but with a broken toilet and a scary case of the squirts, there was no way I was going to stick around. I wanted to get back to my hotel and stick close to my toilet-away-from-home. But this added another problem. You see, traffic in Las Vegas is terrible ALL the time, thanks to a rapidly growing population and roads littered with tourists in rental cars who have no idea where they are going. It would take me at least an hour to get back to my hotel, and I was sure that I was going to have another attack before then. I could feel it. I also thought I might puke, as most food poisoning starts with a diarrhea and follows-up with puke and more diarrhea.
I was driving a rental car. Had it been my own car, I would have taken the risk of shitting my pants in it; but a rental car has to be returned. I could imagine myself bringing it back with a big ol' squishy shitstain on the driver's seat. Not a pleasant fantasy by any stretch of the imagination.
I put my jacket on the seat and got in the car. It was a hundred and twenty degrees in there. I began to drive back to the strip. After ten minutes, I felt another attack coming. More bubbling noises -- louder this time. I scanned the landscape for an oasis of toilets and saw an Arby's sign. I pulled the car into the parking lot with a screech of tires and ran inside. At this point, my bowels were thinkin' Arby's.
This toilet made the one at TJ Maxx look like Shangri-La. This one didn't even have a toilet seat.
I sat on the seatless can and nearly fell in as my pucker-hole vomited hot excrement on all sides of the bowl. My abdomen shrunk with each spasm and my anus burned with the acridness of it. My poor bunghole was screaming in pain; I could see 'roids in my future.
I crawled back in the car and drove back to the hotel, nauseated. I stayed in my room and had a few more attacks. I didn't eat dinner.
Even after it ended, there were still aftereffects, some of which I am experiencing as I type this story. You see, to stop the flow of liquishit while traveling I wolfed down two Imodium and two Pepto-Bismol tablets. It stopped the immediate shit storm, but it caused all manner of other problems. I became constipated and racked with stabbing gas pains that haunted me through my flight home and still to this day. I am shitting somewhat normally now, but I continue to have outrageous gas.
Let this be a lesson to you all: if it tastes funny, don't eat it.