Well… almost.
A couple of years ago I started eating Tuna Fish on the advice of my Trainer, which was an exciting adventure onto itself as I had to get over both my dislike of fish of any kind and knowing that there’s now an alarming amount of Mercury in fish around the world.
It was on one of these days I was casually eating the fish and watching television when the thought of botulism popped into my head.
I’m not sure where it came from as nobody on television was talking about, I hadn’t read about it recently anywhere; it just came out of the blue as I was eating the Tuna… “What if there was bacteria in that can?”
A bacteria I was somewhat familiar with from looking into it years before, but unfortunately the majority of that information went out of my head in a few moments as I started to feel the affects of the poison rushing through my system. You feel a weakness come over you at first as the neurotoxin quickly starts attacking your nervous system and begins shutting down your muscles.
You begin to feel dizzy, have blurred vision that’s followed by a difficulty speaking.
Sadly these are all the same symptoms of adrenaline flushing into your blood stream, so it wasn’t helping the matter.
What popped into my head at this time was numerical logic, which is something I’m blessed with… if I was dying from botulism I wouldn’t have been able to have the time to sit there and think about how I was dying from it. It’s an unusual concept to have two parts of you brain arguing over science.
Botulism lives so well in canned foods because it gets in during the storage phase of the food processing and then along with the food goes into a hibernation so that it doesn’t die out, it can live in there for a long time. Which is usually how it’s contracted in North America, people open their canned meats, eat and then die horrible deaths.
I live out in the boonies so my ability to survive this was limited to my ability to get medical attention in a short period of time, so short in fact that I was unsure that if it came to have to call an ambulance I wouldn’t have the muscle control to dial. The longer I waited, the more likely it was I wouldn’t even be able to make that call.
In this same mind, my brain, was that stats of how many people have actually died from Botulism in North America along with the stats of how many people have actually contracted it.
This is lost on you in the moments when your body is shutting down, because even though you know the numbers they somehow don’t compute as they should; because you actually start to doubt the numbers.
That’s right… you start to question the science.
Who questions Science?
It was at this point I contacted my Brother and the conversation went like this.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Fine.”
“Quick question, can you look up botulism for me?”
“Botulism?”
“Yeah, it’s a bacteria you get from canned food.”
“Botulism?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I think I have it, and I need to know how long I have.”
“You have botulism?”
“Just look it up and tell me how many people die from it a year.”
“Ok…”
“So?”
“Six.”
“Six people?”
“Yeah. In the States, there’s none in Canada.”
“Only six people a year die from it?”
“Only six people a year catch it.”
“Ok then, I don’t have it. Maybe I just don’t like Tuna.”
And that was the day that I almost died from Botulism.