As I lay on the cold shower tiles, head centimetres from what had been my dinner just hours ago, I thought to myself, this is what you don’t see on Instagram. The group trip around Morocco had, so far, been utterly perfect. But at 3.
45am in a remote hotel in Ouirgane, a rural commune one hour south of Marrakech , I was horrifically sick. The kind of unwell that eliminates self-consciousness and makes you, no matter your age, desperate for your mum. To spare the gruesome (and at one point, bloody) details, my stomach settled the following day and I labelled it food poisoning.
Two weeks later, back at home, I was bedridden for two days with similar symptoms but waved it away as eating something that disagreed with my snowflake of a stomach. The third time it happened, one month after my trip, I wondered whether the first bout in Ouirgane was more than just a case of bad tagine. One GP visit and three tests (blood, stool and urine) later proved the hunch correct.
The tests revealed traces of Shigella, a bacterium found around the world and passed via contaminated food and water. Once in your system, it essentially inflames the heck out of your gut and wreaks havoc on your digestive system, which can take weeks, months or, in some cases, years to settle. Since the bacterium was no longer active, antibiotics were off the table and I was told to simply give my gut some TLC and expect a few flare-ups.
(PIC) Most of the time, when we experience gut troubles on holiday , we promptly.