TMI Toilet Tales

Warning: TMI follows. Do not read if you're squeamish about things that the title implies.

Our friend Joe has a penchant for Tweeting about his toilet-based gastrointestinal adventures. More poetic than disgusting, they are good for a chuckle... or a groan. They certainly lend credence to his threats to eat cabbage when things go awry!

Well, this past couple of days have provided some fodder for my own similar statuses/Tweets. Only they weren't so funny.

Wednesday evening we had dinner at my parents' house, after a day of shopping and dentist appointments in the Valley. The food was delicious-- miso soup with tofu and wakame, fried sea bass, fingerling potatoes and green beans. We went to bed satisfied and slept well. The next day, the adventures began. Todd was still in his pajamas, watching some Saturday morning television, when my mother noticed a funny odor coming from where he was. She noticed that his pants were not only wet, but stained and orangeish brown. It appeared to be diarrhea. Cleaned him up, changed him, disinfected the areas where he had sat, and all was well. Couple hours later, Todd went to the bathroom, as he normally does... only this time he decided to check the bowl (after the previous mishap) and called out to tell us that it had happened again-- there in the toilet, were orange globs of oil. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. It wasn't diarrhea, it was simply... orange oil drops! Some of it had leaked onto his underwear, so I changed him yet again and sent him on his merry way.

That evening (Thursday) I arrived home in Santa Barbara and went about my business, making a stop in the bathroom which entailed bringing in a magazine to read. Well, when I was finished, I took a quick peek in the bowl, as I always do to make sure there isn't anything alarming going on down there. Well, aside from a bit of softness that was probably the result of drinking more liquids than usual that day, I noticed some oil, as well. It was especially prominent on the toilet paper. And it was about the color you would expect when you mix orange and, well... brown. Obviously this was the same thing that had happened to my son.

So I got on the computer and Googled "orange oil in stool", where I came across a bevy of blog posts, articles and government advisories on a fish called escolar, the oil of which is indigestible by about 1/3 of the  human population. The common effect of escolar consumption on such people? Leakage of orange drops of oil! But... we had eaten sea bass, which isn't known to cause such an effect. Or so we thought (about the bass)... turns out that escolar is commonly mislabeled as other fish, such as orange roughy (a perch), butterfish, and... *drumroll* sea bass. I remembered that my mom had mentioned that had gotten this "sea bass" on sale-- less than half the price it normally is. I suspected that we had actually fallen victim to this mislabeling, and that what we had thought was bass was actually escolar.

Friday arrives and my body is still processing the fish I had for lunch on Thursday, before I left my parents' home to return to SB, still in the dark about what fun this meal would unleash. I had to go home during my lunch break to change my underwear because the damned stuff leaked without my even being aware of it! It's still coming out when I go to the bathroom-- even if I'm only peeing. My mom called me earlier that day (I had called her Thursday night, to tell her of my immediate Google findings) to report that she, too, had some oil in the stool and was leaking. As of Friday evening, neither Allan nor my dad have reported anything unusual, fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Anyway... lesson learned? Stay away from escolar if ever you come across it on some menu somewhere. And beware of white-fleshed fish priced much cheaper than it normally is. Sea bass normally $9/lb now costing less than $4/lb (and smaller, too)? There's a chance it's not really sea bass. There's a reason this stuff is banned in Japan. I'm just grateful that, given that the side effects could be much worse (nausea, actual diarrhea, vomiting) all my family has experienced is some annoying and inconveniencing oil leakage. I hope that my body finishes processing all this stuff and allows me to be free and clear soon. In the meantime, extra padding is my friend...