Blessed by the Potato

Greetings loyal readers. I want to give you fair warning that this post will contain what is for many people too much information.

You’ve been warned.

Seriously now, I’m going to talk about my pee in a bit, so skip this post if that bothers you…

Ok, so I was at my parents’ for the day, and my dad is still recovering from chemo, so there are a ton of mega vitamins around. A bottle for a multi-B vitamin, some giant vitamin C pills, some vitamin E & D tablets, as well as some echinacea and other herbal junk… the only one missing was A, I think. I usually take a multivitamin at home (Flintstone’s :) since I don’t eat properly at all, but don’t actually seem to need much excess vitamins (I think my system really aggressively absorbs anything I put in it), but my parents only had these crazy grown-up ones. So, I took an individual C, D, and E vitamin, each of which was easily twice the size of my combined multivitamin.

Then, I got a sugar craving, and there wasn’t much sweet in the house. I had to get lunch and money too, so with 3 trips I could justify taking the car (rather than walking, don’t know why I was feeling so lazy, the weather was gorgeous) and got cash, a sub, and stopped at the pharmacy for some snacks. What I really wanted was a pack of Runts, but they didn’t have any. Their whole candy section was depressingly low on stock. I saw some sugar-free hard candies and figured they’d be kind of close to Runts (they were hard and fruity, and that’s how sad the candy section was), and I figured they wouldn’t draw as much flak from my parents (who really want me to stick to my diet since I look like crap).

They tasted pretty good, actually — they were sweetened with a combination of Splenda (sucralose) and another artificial sweetener that I’ve forgotten. There were only 3 flavours, all sour citrus (lemon, lime, and grapefruit) but none of them were overly tart, the sour was very subtle. After I ate about half the package I started to feel really ill and bloated. The stupid things gave me terrible gas pain and I started burping like crazy — so loud once that I scared the dog! Despite all the, er… pressure relief, the bloating was actually really painful/crampy.

That wasn’t all that fun, and I remembered why it was that I distrusted all manner of bizzare, expensive replacements for sugar. Going to the washroom later (I told you there’d be pee) I noticed that my urine was a crazy shade of neon yellow: it looked pretty much just like Moutain Dew. Ever since I had my kidney stone I have to check pretty much every time I go to the washroom to make sure I’m not too dehydrated (or cloudy, or bloody, which is always fun because sometimes when I was passing the stone the pee would be bloody before it really hurt, so I’d see it and be like “oh, shit, this is going to really fucking hurt in a second” and then it would, though most often the blood was actually from the previous round of pain). So I see this and immediately start to worry that the sucralose has somehow made it out of my bloodstream through my kidney, and that no good could possibly come of that.

Turns out it was due to the other thing I ate at my parents’: the B-vitamin complex. It had way, way more vitamin B2 than my body could use in a day, and the excess is naturally expelled by the kidneys and turns your urine freaky bright yellow. Thank goodness for Google, with my history I could have hypochondriacated my way into an emergency room for that one!

PS: I hearby coin “hypochondriacated” as a verb, and you must pay me a dime every time you wish to use it.