PSP - Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning
This happened to me a couple of weeks ago and I can't even tell you how afraid I was! You're probably thinking, 'well July doesn't have any "R"s in it, you bird-brain....' However, I was taught to use the weather and water temperature as a guide, and that the 'month with the "R" in it theory' was a myth, which my doctor and the US Fish and Game Dept. recently confirmed for me. We'd had a very cold, wet spring and so far this summer, warm weather has been far and few between, so I thought it was safe. We'd had no red-tides, no spectacularly warm stretches of weather (just a day or a few here and there), and lots of people we know got them and ate them safely before us.
I was terrified and my husband suggested I make myself throw up, which I did ((ugh)), but, it was obviously already in my system. The tip of my tongue began tingling within about twenty minutes of eating, and I was starving, having been at the beach all day and I was empty before I'd eaten them. It was in my system, it's in my system - that phrase kept running through my mind over and again, I couldn't help it.
I was taken to the emergency room at our local hospital, and the doctor chuckled at me, at first. He suggested I'd read too much - he knew people that gathered shellfish too, and nobody was sick. They hadn't had a case of it in years around here. It didn't take long for him to notice that speech was a serious effort for me - have you ever had novocaine injected into your mouth? It's difficult to talk with a numb tongue, lips and my throat was numbing, too.
They fed me two large bottles of activated charcoal. It was an inky black liquid that was grainy, kind of like chalk, and they tried to flavor it with mint... bless them, but... ick. Activated charcoal will absorb the toxins from your body, I learned, and they said it would (hopefully) clean me out. It wasn't easy, but I drank all of both bottles. It was so thick that I had to add water and shake it to get the thick layer that settled on the bottom of the bottle to come out. It's funny what suddenly becomes palatable when your life depends
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