Many people feel that big rewards come with a hefty price tag. When it comes to the 24 Hours of Sunlight event held last weekend, my wife, Dina's, reward was pretty big. She succeeded in setting the women's record for skiing the most vertical, up and down, in 24 hours (34,500 feet one way). The price? Well, initially, what you'd expect...exhaustion. Not too expensive, really. The next morning, however, the ante went up with some coffee ground emesis. That's the technical term for barfing up blood that's been sitting in your stomach juices long enough to change from bright red to black and coagulated. Hmmmm, not good. Next up was, pardon the graphic description, black shit. Now, from a medical standpoint, there are only a couple of common things that give humans black stools. Pepto Bismol will do it. Blueberries, a lot of them, will get close. But the most likely culprit in a healthy person who knows what they've been stuffing down their pie hole recently is upper gastrointestinal bleeding. By the time blood from, say, a bleeding ulcer gets to the exit, it turns your shit black. Lovely. Now things are getting expensive. Certainly figuratively and, perhaps, literally.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 09:39PM