This story is just plain ridiculous. I’m pretty sure you’ll have a good laugh or two…

Disclaimer: This post is not for the faint of heart and includes quite gross details that may very well classify as TMI. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s absolutely a story worth reading… Especially if you need to feel better about your own life at the moment 😛

Let me start by saying, until Kenya, I had never been legitimately sick in any of the 37 countries I’ve traveled to… (Well, if you don’t count a sinus infections/allergies). I was 8 the last time I legitimately threw up…

Enter Kenya.

I’d already been there for about 5 days with no problems… I was staying outside the city in Kamulu where Bari had been living for the past year… It’s a super small town where the organization has its school. Basically, Bari’s place was the equivalent of some kind of dorm complex you might find at an American summer camp. Cement floors. Mosquito nets. Faulty shower equipment. A leaky toilet. And very shady internet. But it sufficed. I hadn’t expected the Hilton anyway.

So Thursday morning, we get an invitation to go stay with some Americans in the city. They’d been living in Kenya for the past 25 years working as missionaries. They have a nice, western-style house in the city (Nairobi). The only other thing I knew about them was that they had fully functioning wifi! Done and done. We had been starting to feel a little stir crazy in Kamulu, so I was excited. Even more so when I found out they had working internet 🙂 By the time we got there, it was nearly dinnertime… Bari and I lounged around silently drinking delicious coffee and soaking in our fill of wifi on our phones while Holly cooked dinner. Beautiful.

Now, I’d already been traveling for nearly a month, with the previous 3 weeks in India… I like Indian food, don’t get me wrong, and even Kenyan food, but if I had been offered one more chapati (a food both Indians and Kenyans eat often), I might have gone crazy. but I was overjoyed to find that Holly was serving some kind of cheesy chicken noodle soup. Amazing.

I stuffed myself full with the first bowl. Now, nearly anyone who knows me knows I RARELY go for seconds. But this was too good to resist. Chicken noodle soup is already my favorite, and this was CHEESY chicken noodle soup. Mmmmmmm. So, I stuffed myself with a second bowl. And slightly regretted that feeling of eating too much… But I figured it was fine since it’s a super rare feeling for me, since I usually can’t force myself once I’m full…

After dinner, we sat around the fireplace chatting and eating rich chocolate cake, drinking more decaf coffee.

My stomach started feeling a little rumbly, but nothing big. I figured it was just the strange mixture of things I had just quickly slushed down into my stomach.

Soon, we headed to bed. I took one of the son’s bedrooms upstairs (he was around my age but didn’t live at home –> though we met him the night before when he stopped by to visit his parents) and Bari took the extra bedroom downstairs. [She was excited to not have to share a room with someone for the first time in months :P]

But then I just kept feeling worse. Gas. Definitely. I hopped into the shower, but I still felt unsettled afterwards. Sleep is what I needed. Yes, that was it. So, I went to bed sure that I’d wake up feeling a thousand times better in the morning.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

2 AM.

I woke up with a horrible feeling. I didn’t know this feeling. It wasn’t familiar. I sat up, I felt a flash of heat, and before I knew it, I hurled… over the bed, onto the middle of the rug. OHHH MYYY GOSHHHHH. I felt horrible before I could feel embarrassed. I hadn’t felt like this since I was 8! But how could I have not known I needed to run to the toilet! I sat there for a minute, to regain my energy. I tried to scream a weak, “Heeeellllppppp” a few times, but no one heard me.

Finally, when I regained some strength, I managed to stand up and walk downstairs to the room where Bari was staying.

“Bari,” I said in a weak and shaky voice, “Bari, I threw up.”

“What?” She said… Confused.

“I threw up,” I repeated.

“What do you want me to do?” she said. I could tell she still wasn’t full awake.

“I don’t know. I just threw up.”

Then she says, “Just go clean it up.”

“But you don’t understand,” I said, “I threw up on the rug and the bed.”

When she didn’t respond, I just started walking kind of aimlessly around. I walked into her bathroom, and back out and then by the bed… I didn’t know what to do and my brain wasn’t exactly at full speed.

Finally Bari woke fully up and we went upstairs to get Holly.

It was that super awkward feeling when you’re a kid and you stay the night at a friends’ house and you wake up in the middle of the night because you need something but it’s not your own parents, so you can’t just barge into their room and tell them what you need…

I definitely felt like that.

So, Holly came. And acted like my mom and cleaned up everything. I was embarrassed that I didn’t make it to the bathroom, but I felt too sick to be actually embarrassed. I apolgozied a couple of times and she assured me it was fine.

She got me a bucket, and just in time, because while I threw up a second time into the bucket, she at least held my hair back so I didn’t get all in it. So nice. And disgusting. After a few more empty gags, I felt a little better.

After some clean sheets and water and a change of shirt, I crawled back into bed. She also set me up with Bari’s phone to call her (Holly) if I needed anything or started feeling bad again.

I couldn’t fall back asleep. I felt horrible but was determined not to hurl again. I thought I might be dying.

“Could it be malaria?” I wondered. No, I’d taken my meds… for the most part. But I didn’t have any other symptoms. But I was sure I’d contracted some rare African disease and would end up in a shady hospital with people sticking dirty needles in me by morning.

I may or may not have texted some people in the US from my phone, but I honestly don’t remember. I’m pretty sure I sent my boyfriend at the time (who was in Russia – he headed there after we left India) a distraught email saying that I was probably dying. But like I said, I don’t completely remember. I just remember thinking I’d die before I feel asleep.

Finally, I drifted off.

Except that an hour later, I awoke again. I felt bad, but this time, it didn’t feel like vomit. It was the other end. Ohhhh no. I rushed to the toilet, grabbing the phone on the way, because I felt it coming. The explosive kind! Oh no! I hadn’t had that since I was 8 either!

I made it to the toilet just in time. Well… almost just in time. Let’s just say, the majority was in the toilet, thankfully. I thought I would feel relief. Except that after the “explosion”, I all of a sudden felt faint.

“NOOO,” I thought, “I CANNOT pass out by the toilet with diarrhea pants after all this!”

So, immediately, as fast as I could, I went from sitting on the toilet, to lying face down on cool bathroom floor. I wimpered a little bit. I’m so bad at being sick. And this is worse than just being sorta sick. I must look like the world’s worst train wreck.

Not a minute later, I felt it again. Craaaapppp. But literally. Craaapppp. Backwards, I went back to the toilet. I didn’t make it fast enough.

Immediately after the second “explosion”, I felt faint again. Replay. Toilet to knees to floor.  I just lay there, really pitiful. Shameless. With zero dignity left for the moment. On the bathroom floor of someone I’d JUST met, in a totally foreign country. OMG.

It was time to use that phone she gave me. I had nothing left. This was the very bottom, and I’d officially reached it. So I picked up the phone with my weak hands as I lay on the cold tile of the bathroom floor. (Thank God it was clean). Weakly, I searched for the name, Holly…

My luck. There were 2 Hollys. And I had NO CLUE which one this was.

So, with shaky hands, I dial the first one.

No answer.

Must have been the wrong one. I picked it up to dial again, except that I couldn’t remember which Holly I had called. It was an old school phone and I didn’t really know how to find the number I had just called, and even if I had been thinking clearly enough to try, my hands were shaking too much. So, I though, “That’s ok. I’ll just dial whichever one I get to first.” So I picked one and dialed.

“Hello, this is Holly.”

She sounded way too chipper to be someone who was just woken up at 4am or wahtever time it was.

“Hello,” I said weakly and pitifully.

“Who is this?” she said.

I thought she should know that automatically, but when you’ve got it coming out both ends, those neurons just aren’t firing like normal.

“It’s Lauren… I’m in your bathroom,”

“Ummm???”

Finally, my brain made the connection.

“Sorry, wrong number,” I managed to squeak out before hanging up.

I laughed a little because yep, that sounds about right.

This time, I would dial the correct Holly.

Except, that when I looked at the phone again, I couldn’t remember. AGAIN.

So, I dialed another Holly.

“Hello, who is this?”

“Laaauuurrreeennn, I’m in your bathroom…” I said.

“Who?”

“Sorry again. Wrong number.”

Finally, I dialed the correct Holly. Third time’s a charm. Except that this might have been the fourth. And she didn’t answer. I figured that was my sign to give up.

I lay on the floor for who knows how long. Finally, I mustered all the strength I could find, and made it back to the bedroom where I very quickly changed into clean linens and things. After that, I felt wonderful.

I fell asleep immediately. And slept wonderfully.

And that was that.

I felt great when I woke up, just really exhausted.

In the morning, I woke up and felt mortified that I’d not known to make it to the toilet in time to throw up, and also mortified that I’d spent who knows how long laying on these strangers bathroom floor, and also mortified that I was pretty sure I didn’t have any clean underwear left.

Ohhh myy gosh. I did my best to clean up. But I didn’t have any other clean clothes. I was able to change everything that was at least visibly dirty. Gross. I thought about going commando, but this was Kenya. And anyway, my pants hadn’t been washed in at least a week. And they’d been who knows where in between.

I told Bari the story of the phone and found out the other Holly had been her cousin back in the States. We laughed about it. And I told her to tell her cousin sorry about the creepo calling.

…First we thought food poisoning of some kind, but I hadn’t eaten anything different from anyone else. So we decided it must have been some kind of ingredient that they were all used to but my stomach wasn’t. Who knows. Very strange. Especially since none of the Kenyan food had given me issues… only this “American” food.

Holly was very kind. She assured me that I wasn’t the first person who had been sick at her house. Apparently that’s their thing. Foreigners getting sick at their house.

All I wanted to do after that was get back to Bari’s place and change clothes and then take a nap. But we were relying on other people for transportation and our route included stopping at a market for a while.

While we were roaming about this market, we definitely passed the son who’s room I’d just been dirtily sick in the night before. He still didn’t know about it. And I didn’t feel the need to tell him.

Finally, around 2pm we made it back to Bari’s place. I sighed with relief.

Except that this still wasn’t the end of the worst story ever.

Bari’s roommates had left town and taken the only key to the house with them. They were new and were still learning the vibe of things, but they didn’t seem real open to being told any kind of advice. Apparently there was a ‘rule’ that if you have the key and you leave the house without all roommates, you leave they key with the dorm-lady in charge so that if the others get back before you do, they can still get into their house. Well, like I said, they weren’t really open to being told what to do, so they had overlooked this consideration.

Bari gave one of them a call and asked if she had the key and where she was.

Certainly, she had taken the ONLY key with her to the to the slums for the day(an hour away) and they wouldn’t be back for several hours.

I was about to cry.

You’d be about to cry too if you had been me.

Bari said kindly to her on the phone, “Well, next time, we need to make sure to leave the key with so-and-so because we all need to have access to our house.”

I heard her snap back very rudely on the phone, “God, Bari, I KNOWWWW.”

I was about to lose it. I have freaking diarrhea in my freaking underwear. And this was NOT the first time this week that this girls’ rejection of helpful ‘advice’ had caused someone else turmoil. My blood was boiling with the little bit of energy I had in me.

I’m pretty sure I started crying a little. I was already worn down from 3 weeks of travel in India where I’m pretty sure I cried just from exhaustion and pent up emotion more times than I had in the entire previous year.

Thankfully, one of Bari’s Kenyan friends had an open door for us down the road and let us take a nap at her place. I still hadn’t changed, but sleep counts for a lot.

Finally, around 7pm, the key arrived, and I finally got to put on clean clothes.

Worst. Travel. Story. Ever.