That is how bad and desperate I felt — I willingly put my face on my kids’ bathroom floor. Gross. I will need therapy over that one. At the time, though, it seemed the lesser of two evils.

I just needed some tiny bit of relief from the intense heat cooking me from the inside out  and the searing pain of my guts kinked up like a cheap garden hose. I couldn’t ever remember having stomach cramps quite like that. And I’ve lived through contractions — with three separate births.

It was horrible.

And as I was sprawled out on the floor, debating whether or not I dared leave the bathroom, it hit me: Oh crap. Could this be COVID? Diarrhea is one of the weird but overlooked signs.

Then more rational reasoning kicked in.

I counted back the hours to dinner and the timing totally jived. Most likely it was food poisoning. It seemed like hours — my Fitbit later said I spent only 41 minutes awake in the night, thinking I was dying — before I was able to get dressed and hunch-walk back to my room, where the floor seemed a better choice than crawling all the way back up into bed. The carpet smelled like dog. I chose poorly again.

The next morning I felt much better. Crisis — and COVID — passed. Quite literally.

It had to have been food poisoning. We worked our way through the dinner ingredients: pasta, kale, chickpeas, Spanish chorizo.

“Where’d you get the chorizo from?” Joe asked.

“Amazon.”

“Oh my God! You bought sausage off Amazon? Well, there you go.”

So I guess sausage probably isn’t something you should order online. In June. In Tucson. Lesson learned. The hard way. The very hard way.

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Book details soon. Pinky-swear.