When you have a case of food poisoning, the world seems to go off on a different tangent. Time either seems to move far too quickly or slowly depending on the stage you’re in. I went through both phases where at one point I thought I’d take a nap for 30 minutes and woke up 2 hours later to discover the sun had set and it was dark outside. At another point I decided to take a long nap during the day and woke up after what I felt was three hours to discover I had been asleep for only 45 minutes. It’s not the mind playing tricks – it’s the bug that scrambles all signals and prevents your mind from being able to make cohesive decisions. The amazing journey started around 4AM on Sunday when I woke up and had a nasty bout of vomiting. I’ve never had food poisoning before and this was a rather interesting incident for me because my body temperature went up to 39 degrees Celsius and then decided to stay there while I began to wonder if hell had frozen over at last. It was worse when I finally took a trip to Suva Private Hospital and there was an overbearing nauseous smell of paint thinner. I hate the smell of paint and the smell of paint thinner is worse than the smell of fresh paint. It’s certainly not the sort of smell you would like to smell when you have food poisoning and you end up at the hospital during a long weekend and things seem to slow down a tad bit. By the time the doctor saw me, I was beginning to feel the same effects of high that glue sniffers get and feeling very light headed to the point where I just wanted to go to sleep.

It took the hospital a clever bit of diagnosing to figure out what had caused the poisoning and we finally settled on the idea that it was a result of the chicken burger and fries I had eaten at TappooCity on Saturday. This was reinforced by the fact that someone else had eaten there and had also eaten the same me with similar results so we were pretty certain where hell had originated. Of course I’m not too sure about the food preparation standards of any restaurant in Fiji because we don’t exactly have a vigilant food and hygiene standard unit. If we did, then 90% of the eateries in Fiji would be closed, 5% issued with hygiene standard violation warnings, 4% would be fined and just 1% allowed to continue operating. I walk through town daily and I take a cursory glance into most eateries as I walk past them. The conditions are atrocious. The rooms are stuffy, reeking of oil and there is absolutely no ventilation save the electric fan slowly spinning away. Worse is that most restaurants don’t even have a proper fire escape or a secondary door in the event there is a fire. I have long developed a knack for telling whether food is reheated or cooked fresh. I can confidently tell you here and now that just about every Indian and Asian restaurant in Suva reheats all its food until it is completely sold out because they’re not going to let the food go to waste despite the fact that continuous reheating is building up the bacterial colony to the point where they can afford their own armada and decide to invade the host. The restaurant owners know they can easily get away with their devious methods because Fiji doesn’t have laws which would make reheating food beyond a certain point illegal. In most countries, reheating cooked food in a restaurant is simply illegal because the mass quantity of food cooked poses a huge risk for things to go wrong. Salmonella poisoning is a very common occurrence with anything chicken and if we had anything like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Fiji, (more…)

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