Andrews Family

We had a good day last Sunday. After Mass, we decided to have a treat and go out for a nice lunch. Jenny picked one of her favorite places - The Olive Garden. Jenny likes the soup & salad, which is what we usually get (she especially likes that you can get a deal on the combo for lunch). I like the soup, but I’m not much of a fan of the salad. Since we were treating ourselves, Jenny suggested that I get the steak & pasta to share with her. That way she would get soup & salad and steak & pasta. Sounded like a win/win situation to me.

When the food came, the steak and pasta looked good. The menu describes it as "Steak Gorgonzola-Alfredo: Grilled beef medallions drizzled with balsamic glaze, served over fettuccine tossed with spinach and gorgonzola-alfredo sauce. Steak prepared medium unless otherwise requested." Note at the end that it says prepared medium unless otherwise requested. I usually order mine medium-well, but I figured medium sounded good and they ought to be good at it right? Not so much. The first piece I cut into was more like rare, but it had taken a long time for it to come and Livy wasn’t interested in staying any longer than she had to, so I figured it would be ok. So I had eaten 2-3 bites of meat when Jenny decided to try some. She cut into a different piece and it looked like it hadn’t even been cooked. Our waitress happened to be walking by and saw it and immediately took the plate away. Since Livy was getting restless we told her we couldn’t wait for another one and she said they’d just take it off our bill. Then when the bill came out, the manager took it and said he would take care of the whole thing. Sweet, a free meal. Since the steak & pasta took a while we had already filled up on soup and breadsticks anyway. By the way, Livy really likes breadsticks!

And now… the rest of the story. About midnight I became violently ill. That’s as graphic as I’ll get, but I was up ALL night. It was pretty clear with how sudden it came on that it wasn’t the flu. After little improvement and a temperature of 101, Jenny took me to the doctor after lunch. He confirmed that it was due to "improperly prepared food", aka food poisoning. He prescribed the antibotic Cipro, which is the same thing that’s used to treat inhalation Anthrax. It seemed to work well, but I was still out from work for 2.5 days. After a week, I am finally almost back to normal. But that was just the start of my shall we say "challenging" week. I will have to tell you about that in another post.