The first time that I ever had like, a foodborne illness, it was from bell pepper. A bad bell pepper. I graduated so hard.
In 2013, I was 53 years old and living in Florida when I got ill from eating lettuce at the restaurant where I worked. Right away I knew that something wasn’t right. I immediately felt off, physically, and wondered at the time if there was something on the produce like bleach or something. And then later on that night, I woke up in a daze, dizzy, and disoriented. I started regurgitating violently. I couldn’t control it, and I couldn’t stop it. I felt like I was under a spell that I couldn’t get out of. And it wouldn’t let me go. I threw up so hard and so violently, something erupted in my neck, and it started swelling. And I immediately went to the hospital. I was on an IV for at least five days, if not longer. It was all a blur.
I specifically told the medical staff that it was something that I ate. But I don’t know if they were really listening to me because they didn’t take a stool sample, which I now know they should have done. At the time, I didn’t know the exact procedures of food poisoning, especially for the hospital. They need to take your stool sample. It’s important, but I think for a lot of people in this line of work, facing a situation like this – they start thinking about lawsuits, instead of – you know, helping someone get better like they’re supposed to do. But I was thinking, hey, what about the general public? Because I worked in a restaurant, I thought somebody should know about this. Because, if the same thing happened to a child or someone older than me, they would have probably died. That’s how violent the sickness was. It’s terrible. You know it’s bad when people say, “I wouldn’t wish this my worst enemy”.
And so eventually I got better. But after I realized what it was, after seeing in the news that a specific brand of produce was recalled for Cyclospora I went back to work, and I talked to the manager, and I told him about it — because we ordered produce from the company implicated in this recall.
Because I worked there, I know where the produce delivery is coming from. I pay attention to boxes and labels. It’s a brand that everybody buys.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but food poisoning is disguised a lot. I say the word “disguise” because, you might think it’s a flu or some other kind of stomach bug. The symptoms could be the same. But you brush it off and you don’t retrace your steps. You try to just forget about it. If that’s a good way to say it.
So immediately I knew the salad that I had that day, it was no good. I remembered that earlier in the day a guy returned his food and said he didn’t want it. He returned his food and said he’d do a bad review on Yelp. I didn’t know about Yelp, but I found out. I looked up Yelp, and it was people saying that they got sick from my restaurant, um, sick from the restaurant where I worked.
And so, when I went back to the manager and I told him, “I got sick from eating here. And I’m pretty sure it was food poisoning.” And I asked him if he acknowledged that we got lettuce that was part of a major recall – if people reported getting sick. He told me, “Yes, of course,” but I didn’t trust him because of how the management generally treated people. This manager was in the habit of saying inappropriate things toward black people, you know, “as a joke”.
One of the managers was pretty openly racially prejudiced, but the other one I just talked sports with and didn’t know if he was or not. They had some shady dealings going on in the business that I knew about, so I think that gave me some security in my job – because of the possibility that I might talk. The environment there was pretty stifled though. So, when I went to talk to a manager about being sick and WHY I got sick, I had my phone out and I recorded the whole conversation. When he realized what was happening, he jumped up and said, “Get the hell out of here!” At that moment, he was angry with me for not just getting sick and being gone from work, but for talking about it.
He fired me. I had just gotten out of the hospital. I think it’s safe to say he never came clean about having contaminated lettuce. This is a privately owned business, with three locations. So, the cover up — that’s the part that I really oppose. I don’t know if it’s because of my culture, who I am or who I look like, that I didn’t get the help that I needed. But a lot of people don’t know what others go through or that there are people who are not getting help with things that happen to them, or people willing to take us seriously when something like this happens. Everybody always thinks it’s about the money — that people want a payout because they get deathly ill. I knew that I was part of an outbreak, even though the hospital neglected to test for it. I called the company that was taking a major blow from all of their contaminated lettuce to let them know I got sick from that particular restaurant. Because, uh, I knew the manager never called. Never called. And that’s the sad part. If I died, who would fight for me? Or how would they say what made me sick? What killed me? It’s just not fair. Like I said, someone older than me, or a kid, a baby, couldn’t handle what I handled. It was terrible. The whole experience.
