In the days before my fifty-third birthday, I’m marvelling at how young I feel, in my head. Christmas still holds some vestigial magic for me, distinct from gifting and cocktails, and the truth about Santa is a door, left ajar, in my mind. Fart jokes are still pretty funny.
This is increasingly at odds with my body’s failings. Top of my mind: the torn hip labrum confirmed on MRI last month, keeping me from all my favourite, arduous, outdoor pursuits and not the kind of thing you fix with surgery. So, another accrued complaint to go with my bunions, falling arches, gum recession, fading eyesight, and the way I turn my head to listen with my better ear. All the complaints of a broken-down body accumulating almost imperceptibly, like a pension.
What’s more, I’m now limping, having tweaked my knee in the night—my already-frayed meniscus getting itself snagged in the complicated architecture of my long-suffering knees. For the meniscus, however, I blame the morels.
Why do we opt to add the dried morels to the cream sauce of our Boxing Day ravioli? A dish that would have been perfectly decadent and delicious sans morels?
Because we have them, is the answer. Because they were gifted to us by a foodie/forager-friend of my father’s. Adding them seems posh and festive. I even think of googling “morel nutritional content” to see if they are specifically good for something. Iron or protein or torn labrums. Instead I google how to rehydrate them. In milk, for 20 minutes, if you’re wondering.
That’s not what you should be wondering.
We dine. We watch a movie about Santa retiring. We finish the last of the shortbread and go to bed.
I wake abruptly at 11:30 PM, saliva mustering in my mouth like a viscous army. My body, naked, slick with sweat, gets out of bed and my brain thinks, matter-of-factly: Oh. You are soon to vomit.
How incredible what the body knows. The body takes a pillow from the bed intending to place it at the foot of the toilet for the tender knees, but the mind places a hand on the body’s arm to stay this instinct. Do you really want your pillow on the ground by the toilet? Think this through. Is the vomiting imminent? Is it even inevitable? The mind, here, is at odds with the body, but the body is so sure. It has never been more sure.
Fetch a bucket, says the body, already striding towards a broom closet.
Something cleaner, the mind pipes up. A bowl. Neither the mind nor the body can stomach the thought of a bucket used for anything other than the present purpose.
How large? the mind asks.
The largest size, the body reasons, moving resolutely, but carefully, through the dark house. Now is not the time for tripping on anything. The body must be able to focus entirely on the vomiting.
And, in time, not so very much time, it does.
Even as the body is hunkered on the bathroom floor and jackknifed over the bowl, heaving; even as the body is reaching out an arm to the roll of toilet paper (so high up the wall!) to swab at the spit and muck on its lips; even as the body, crouched on the tiles, is deftly dumping the beige contents of the bowl into the toilet, the mind is thinking: is this the best angle at which the body should be vomiting? Might this inflame the torn labrum?
The husband, having woken, is a blizzard of panic and sympathy and ineptitude. He is reading about poisonous mushrooms on his iPhone and it is not great news. He reaches a trembling hand to the body’s back, but the body snarls like a wolf, unintelligible.
The body is too hot to be touched, the mind offers, apologetically, but she is only half-listening to the husband because she is so astonished by, so proud of, the body.
Look at her! Look at how forcefully and rationally the body is making the best of what is irrefutably a terrible and explosive situation. The mind should be channeling her thoughts towards the rather dire prognosis of bodies that ingest mushrooms that masquerade as morels, and indeed, the husband has tiptoed back from the savage, lava-drenched horror erupting like Pompeii on the bathroom tiles, and is researching mushroom toxicity from the safety of the bed. But the mind finds she can only focus on her admiration for the body. What a marvel! This body, just days ahead of her 53rd birthday, demonstrating her ferocious vitality and vigor like a boss.
The husband has found the number for the 1-800 poison hotline. He has also found the name Gyromitra esculenta. It is a noxious species of mushroom easily mistaken for a morel that causes violent vomiting, which resolves, only to then shut down your liver, kidney, and birthday plans within two to three days, often ending in death. The mind thinks it would be prudent to call the poison hotline expediently, but the body, calmer now, thinks it is at least worth checking what it would be like to brush the body’s teeth and give the body a sip or two of water.
It would be bad, the body learns.
Even the mind, distracted as she is by the internet-foraged gloom amassed by the husband, can’t help but think: tooth-brushing seems premature.
The body sweats like a motherfucker. Foul, slimy fluids tinged with a funky, fungal must are coursing off her like she’s just been birthed by a backyard composter. What with the torn labrum and the feet with their ridiculous fifty-two-point-whatever-year-old grievances, the body hasn’t worked up a sweat like this in months, possibly years. The body pours.
The mind is amazed, truly amazed by the rank odour coming from the body, or out of the body. It’s incredible. Fantastic.
The body is back to cradling the bowl to her breast like something beloved, recently dead. She cannot be parted with it. The bowl’s life’s purpose is not salads or cookie dough—and indeed can never again be used for these quotidian functions—it is a chalice for vomiting and for the dumping of vomit. The body dutifully flushes the toilet (the mind is agog at this, the efficiency, the attention to detail). Now the body is grappling again towards the mile-high toilet-paper roll, clawing at the wall like she’s treed a cougar. Why, thinks the mind, could the husband have not reached around his unrecognizable wife to pass the body the toilet paper before retreating to the safety of his duvet?
And then calm.
The body is shivering now. Too cold to contemplate a shower. The body crawls into bed and the mind is smug to have offered the advice about the pillow, now unsullied beneath the body’s head. The mind is content to spend fifteen minutes on hold while an intermittent and friendly voice on the 1-800 poison hotline exhorts her not to hang up unless there is a body choking, in cardiac arrest, or losing consciousness, in which case 9-1-1 would be the appropriate number to dial. The husband is wide-awake, scrolling mushroom horrors. Why on earth, thinks the mind, listening properly now, does anyone, ever, eat a single mushroom? It’s foolhardy. Almost laughably so. This body will never let another mushroom pass her lips, the mind is sure of it.
A serious but reassuring voice, at last, asks what has been ingested. The mind is embarrassed and contrite. People the world over are dying in far more tragic and respectable circumstances than the mind’s almost-fifty-three-year-old body may or may not now be dying.
The body in the bed beside the husband is deeply satisfied and sore. At risk of falling asleep. Radiating calm and self-satisfaction at a job well done. The mind feels another flutter of affection and pride. It’s been a long time, she thinks, since the body has been able to truly showcase her gifts. Her power and stamina. Her unerring instincts. It’s impressive. She’s impressive.
Were the morels cooked at high heat for more than five minutes, asks the serious reassuring voice?
Hmmph, grunts the body. Tuckered out. Bored.
But the mind is grasping at this like a life preserver. Might the body have not ingested a stray and conniving Gyromitra esculenta after all? Morels (and the husband is simultaneously muttering about this, from the internet, even as the poison hotline lady is explaining) need to be cooked at least five minutes (or did she say 15?), ideally more, to rid them of toxic hydrazines, otherwise they can cause severe gastrointestinal upset.
The body snorts. Upset. That’s for amateurs. The body flips the pillow to the cool side and pops the grind guard back in the body’s mouth. No need to lose more precious molar over some bad morels.
We did not cook the morels, the mind admits to the poison hotline lady. They were soaked in milk. This now feels like taking a serial killer to the spa for a facial. They were sprinkled over the sauce like a classy afterthought. Where on earth was this critical intel about five minutes of high-heat cooking back when the internet was offering up the 20-minute rehydrating milk bath? The mind agrees to get the husband to take a photo of the leftover morels to email to the poison people for analysis, but she is already remembering the dryer-lint colour and texture of the vomit the body was emptying into the toilet. Oh, they will never, ever again eat mushroom soup. Not for love or money. That’s the moral here: not cook the morels, but no morels. No mushrooms. None. Nada.
The next morning, the right knee will be locked up and agonizing. The mind will blame the contortionist antics on the floor tiles, the unfathomable height of the toilet paper, the leg coiled at an unnatural angle around the bathtub. On principle, the mind will want to have a sleep-in that morning, but the body won’t. A creature of habit. Extraordinary. And it will be December 27th, Mum’s birthday. She would have been eighty-five years old today, an impossible age; she was only allotted seventy-three. The unfairness of this is its own incurable injury.
The mind will notice that the husband, who has proven demonstrably less susceptible to hydrazine toxicity, is eying his wife furtively for signs of organ failure. The body, however, is chiefly focused on breakfast, what with dinner being cancelled after the fact. The sun that morning will come out for the first time in days, and it will be glorious to be alive.
For now, past midnight, the body is halfway back to dreamland and mumbling something about quiche. Something about toast.
No, never, agrees the mind, no mushroom quiche. No mushroom sauce. No mushrooms on toast, no matter how many more days, or years, or decades we are gifted with. And by God, body, you magnificent beast: let’s do that. All of it. Ferociously.
Note: Big shout-out to the British Columbia Drug and Poison Information Centre for existing, and for being kind. And yes, I know that’s not a morel pictured in the photo above. It’s a picture of an unknown mushroom I took in the forest today, where a mushroom should be, uneaten.