I’ve gone into Canada many times, but this weekend is the first time I’ve ever gotten a Canadian stamp on my passport. Before, I have gone via car into British Columbia, and yesterday I flew into Toronto.

I like Canada. They’re really very, very good neighbors. We should all appreciate having them next door. They’re polite, mellow, make a few decent beers, and are just different enough without being too wacky that they add a little variety to the northern end of North America.

(I will qualify this by pointing out that I have zero experience with Quebec, which everyone says is different than the rest of Canada.)

They drive on the right, talk like my cousins in Minnesota, and eat most of the same foods we do. What’s not to like aboot Canada, eh?

I’m a geek sometimes. I know it, I can admit it. I like to learn stuff. I read voraciously and follow the news and can be a little bit obsessive about it.

But man, I never really wanted to learn as much as I have the past few days about food poisoning and intestinal disorders!

Be warned, this post will be a bit graphic about bodily functions.

I woke up about 2am on Monday the 19th with the urge to use the bathroom. Diarrhea, and not very nice diarrhea, either- green and really foul-smelling.

I mean, okay, it’s liquid poop, of course it’s not going to smell like roses, but this was particularly vile. I can’t quite describe the smell, other than to say that it was just really WRONG. And there was a LOT of it.

In addition, it smelled like the chicken burrito I’d had for dinner. So I figured it just wasn’t sitting right and went back to bed.

Half hour later, up again, same deal. And again a ton of goo. Plus, I started feeling nauseous.

Now I’m getting a bit bummed. I figured it was just a bad meal forcing its way out of my system (ever see Alien, when the baby alien comes out of the guy’s chest?) and once it passed I’d be okay.

This continued on until about 6am when I finally gave in and threw up. And again it was more than I could have imagined. Now I’m feeling really trashed, Ginger is getting worried, and in a little over 2 hours the taxi is coming to take us about halfway to Machu Picchu (the train doesn’t make it all the way to Cusco yet because of flood damange).

I made the good effort to get up, dressed, and go. Only threw up two or three times but by the time the taxi came I was feeling semi-okay, so we jumped in and headed out of town. Within about five minutes I knew there was no way I could do this.

Ginger said I was as pale as a ghost. I’m pretty blanco already but she said I looked really BAD. We had the taxi take me back to town and drop me off by where I thought the clinic was.

One thing about being in a developing nation- if you have money, you get excellent service in the bigger tourist areas. When the hotel clerk called, the clinic sent out TWO doctors plus a driver in a Nissan Pathfinder to pick me up.

Go back in and they test me, first my blood and then stool samples. The blood test came back first, positive for salmonella. Stool confirmed it.

As it turns out, the levels were considerably higher than they normally see for food poisoning. The stuff was in my blood, meaning my whole system had it. And they started to narrow down the subtype.

Meanwhile, I was SICK. Frequent trips to the bathroom. No more puking but you couldn’t believe the volumes of foul gunk coming out. Once they shot me up with some drugs and it kept up, they started to suspect more than just salmonella.

As it turns out, I had the typhoid subtype of salmonella, but I also had an amoeba called entamoeba histolytica. This nasty little bug gives you amoebiasis, which can range from an infection that sits latent and never makes you sick, to dysentery.

Dysentery is when you have blood and mucus in your stools because your intestinal linings are under so much attack from the amoeba. If they break through and get into your system, you can be REALLY sick (as if you’re not already sick enough!)

This is what was going on inside my poor tummy. They had immediately cranked up the Cipro; this antibiotic does a pretty good number on salmonella and I was feeling better within 5 or 6 hours of getting that cranked into my IV.

So when I kept up with the nasty diarrhea, the doc at the clinic wisely had another sample tested and found the amoeba after my first day there. They also narrowed down the salmonella subtype to typhi, which is what causes typhoid fever.

Typhoid left untreated kills you about 10 to 30 percent of the time, but with treatment with modern antibiotics it’s nowhere near as bad.

And believe it or not, but I was actually lucky I got it. If I hadn’t gotten the typhoid, then the amoeba would have had longer to get set up in my system and really attack the intestinal walls. As it was, since I was in the clinic and they were looking at stool samples (sorry to be graphic), they saw the blood and signs of the amoeba and were able to stop it earlier than normal.

If I hadn’t gotten salmonella typhi, then I probably would have just had a more mild case of the runs until the amoeba really tore me up.

Once they knew I had the amoeba, they added another drug to my treament, and pow… within another 10-12 hours the inflammation and such in my intestines was getting better.

And now I know way more than I wanted to know about this kind of thing. Tell you one thing- I am very, very glad I went to the clinic. I can only urge you all to do the same if/when you ever get the runs and they’re more than “normal” and if they’re super-foul smelling.

It might save you a lot more time and hassle in the long run. They said if I hadn’t been treated, I probably would have lived, but would have been sick for a few weeks instead of a few days.

And I’ll tell you one more thing… I’ll never again feel superior to the people who skip over the local food and hit the McDonald’s franchise in these foreign lands. It might be McFood, but at least it’s cooked to a known safety standard the vast majority of the time!

I’ve traveled a lot. I took a three week trip in China and went plenty of places that foreigners don’t normally go. Been to Thailand (my wife’s fave) a number of times, Singapore, Malaysia, Bali…

Never got food poisoning.

Until last night.

We went out to eat around 8 or 9. Went back to the hotel, get some rest because today we were supposed to take a cab and then a train out to Aguas Calientes, the little town that sits right next to Machu Picchu.

About 2 I woke up and had to use el bano. I had the runs and they were FOUL. Happened a few more times. Around 4:30 I felt like I was going to puke; held off until 6 when I couldn’t stand it anymore. I think I barfed up my toenails, it was amazing.

Same thing, alternating ends, all morning. We actually got into the cab and started going out of town but within about 5 minutes I knew I was in no shape for this today. I told Ginger to just go on without me, she would have stayed if I’d insisted but I didn’t want her to miss out.

Came back into town, went into the nearest hotel, asked for help and the clinic. The desk clerk set me up with a clinic that caters to foreigners here in Cusco. They know food poisoning when they see it!

Got tested, sure enough it’s salmonella. They fired me up with some IVs (as I write this at 7:30pm central time I’m on my third of the day) and Cipro, plus anti-nausea meds, plus some stuff to keep my tummy feeling okay.

Blech. Ginger was right, she had said earlier in the day to not eat chicken unless it’s sizzling hot. I had a burrito and apparently it wasn’t done correctly.

So now it looks like I’ll spend the night here in the clinic. Managed to eat a little veggie ramen and toast for dinner a little while ago. I haven’t thrown up for hours but am still suffering at the other end. Blech.

I guess I was due, you can’t travel THAT much and never ever get sick. It sucks because now I’m going to miss Machu Picchu. Booooooo.

Ah well, just have to come back sometime. We’ve seen some incredible stuff already and had a great time so it was worth it for that!

I got myself a “netbook” the other day. For those who haven’t been paying attention, netbooks are basically small laptop computers; while there’s no “official” definition of a netbook (just as there’s not really an official definition of what’s a “laptop” vs a “notebook”) they’re generally thought of as having no optical (DVD/CD) drive, an 11 inch or smaller display, very lightweight, not a lot of memory in them, and running a considerably less powerful processor.

Many netbooks don’t even come with Windows installed, choosing instead to go with a Linux OS of one brand or another.

I bought an Asus EeePC 1005HA. It’s a great little machine, though a bit pricier than many in the netbook category (one of the big attractions of netbooks is that you can often buy one for as little as 200-250 bucks).

I chose this model primarily for one reason- it’s among the very tip-top leaders in battery life. I was down to this or the Toshiba NB205, which also has tremendous battery life. Both of these units are claimed (by their manufacturers) to be able to run “all day”, up to 10 hours.

Netbooks generally have wireless networking built in, and many also have Bluetooth; of course both of these things run your battery down faster and it’s pretty tough to get the full 10.5 hours of runtime that the makers claim, but for the 1005HA I’ve found that I have been able to run it for several hours (and I’m talking like 7+ hours easy) while doing web browsing, which uses more power through the wireless networking.

The 1005HA has a 10 inch screen. I almost went with the EeePC that has an 11 inch screen, but it runs a different processor and in the end I decided that the main thing I was buying it for was portability- hence get the smallest, lightest one I can live with. The 10 inch screen serves me just fine, though I think if I had crappier eyesight I might have wanted the 11 inch model. (I don’t wear glasses and still see reasonably well even after a few hours reading, so I’m lucky there.)

The other thing that the Asus model has that Toshiba doesn’t is as close to a regular keyboard as possible. I write a LOT and am a touch typist, so a good feel to the keyboard was very important to me. The Toshiba uses a “chiclet” keyboard that I was not crazy about, but the Asus has one that’s basically a normal keyboard, just one that’s about 90 or 95% of the size of a standard keyboard.

How do I like it? I love it. The main factor is the portability, and it’s incredibly small and lightweight- less than half the weight of my old laptop (which is almost 10 years old now) and thin, too. The power supply is small and lightweight, too, with the brick in the middle of the cord being smaller than most.

Unfortunately, this means the power supply takes longer to recharge the battery- I ran it down to almost dead and after being plugged in for 7+ hours while the computer was turned off, the battery still wasn’t fully recharged. This makes sense, though- it takes a long time to run the battery down, and the power supply runs at a relatively low 9 volts or so.

The screen is plenty bright and sharp. A higher resolution display would be nice (it’s 1024X600) but it’s plenty serviceable. It came with the standard 1 gig of memory and I’ve been okay with how it runs on that, although I’m waiting for a 2-gig memory stick to upgrade it (you can run them with 1 or 2 gigs of memory and 2 is said to significantly improve performance).

I waited to order mine until Windows 7 was out; netbooks are still shipping with Windows XP and pretty much have ignored Vista. I use a computer at work with Vista and while it’s okay, I prefer XP; there’s really nothing wrong with it and that’s what I run at home. (Why upgrade when there’s nothing in the new version you need?) The OS works fine on the netbook and despite the fact that it’s a slower CPU, it’s actually as fast or faster than my home machine on many tasks. (Which is more a sign that it’s time to upgrade my desktop, which is some years old now.)

Finding a good case for it was actually more trouble than I thought. I wanted something with a harder shell sides because the whole point of this little netbook is that it’s super-portable; I want to be able to throw it into a backpack and haul it onto airplanes in carryons, take it to work, whatever. I found a kind of cool hardshell cover for it that I really like on the Toshiba site when I was deciding on which computer to buy.

I later found the same case at Fry’s for the same price as Toshiba sells it for. It’s not a full hardshell, but it offers good-enough protection plus the way it’s built you can use it as a little desk for your netbook and depending on which way you turn it, it’ll slope the thing away or towards you, depending on what you need (if you’re sitting up in bed, or sitting on a couch, or whatever).

On top of that, the case is “checkpoint friendly“, which is a pretty big deal if you fly a lot. Checkpoint friendly cases are ones that are transparent to the X-ray machines, meaning you don’t have to haul the computer out completely; just pull out the little case and lay it on the tray to go through the machine. This one meets the definition of a “sleeve”, so it works just fine.

The Asus also ships with a pretty standard neoprene sleeve with a zipper on it. It’s okay for basic use and of course weighs next to nothing, which is pretty cool.

In addition to the case and the 2gig memory, I bought two other accessories. One is a fairly normal USB DVD drive; it can run over a single USB plug but runs better if you use both of its USB plugs at the same time. It uses both USB connections to get more power. No batteries or external cords; it runs strictly on power from the computer. I don’t plan on traveling with it frequently; if I want movies I’ll just save them to the hard drive on the netbook or to an SD memory card (the netbook has a built-in memory card reader for SD/MMC cards, which is really nice when it comes to transferring pictures from a digital camera that uses those cards).

But for ease of installing stuff onto the computer, or as a “just in case” type of thing, it’s nice to have the DVD drive.

The other accessory that I bought was a mouse. I came across a returned Microsoft notebook/portable mouse at Fry’s for 33 bucks, which was a pretty good deal (this particular model is usually more like 40 to 50 bucks).

Most of your “portable” laptop mice have a little plug that goes into a USB port, but this one is Bluetooth, so no additional plugs are needed. It connects up more or less instantly to the computer and works like a charm. I love it; it’s one of the best mice I’ve ever used. They say that the battery life is very long on these, which is good; it’s also small and lightweight and comes with its own little neoprene carrying case.

Only downside is that if I ever want to use it with something else, that something else has to be Bluetooth-enabled. Oh well.

All this stuff set me back around 500 bucks, which is a pretty amazing deal. I love the netbook; its performance is just fine and it’s so much smaller and lightweight that it saves me a lot of hassle. Taking it with on trips is the default, whereas before I would have to strongly consider how much I really wanted/needed to have a computer along.

I’m flying to Houston this coming weekend and so I’ll get a chance to really try it out on a plane for movies for the first time. If I think of it I’ll update on how it works out.