Poisons . . .

One of my fellow writing buddies is an Emergency Physician and she also has a credential in Toxicology. She has a twice monthly podcast on poisons that is excellent. I started writing about my victim in Australia, but hadn’t decided on how he ended up dead. Her podcast gave me ideas.

Strangely enough I poisoned myself recently and quite accidentally. I had mostly recovered from a diverticulitis flare-up and went on the search as to how I could prevent future flare-ups even though this was my first in three years. As always, I go to the NIH database and look for articles that prove or disprove my thesis. My question this time was there evidence that probiotics would help prevent flare-ups? The answer was yes if I focused on three bacterial strains. So I searched for a probiotic with my targeted strains and started taking it. About thirty-six hours after the first dose I felt terrible - my joints ached, I had a fever of 100 and I was exhausted. I took a covid test and it was negative. I took a bunch of Tylenol and felt better by the next morning. I shrugged and moved on. Then three days later, I had the same onset of symptoms and thought, “This is weird.” Then the warning bells went off in my head at four in the morning and I reached out to Dr. Google. I asked, “Can probiotics cause flu-like symptoms?”

Voilà, Dr. Google had my answer. It seemed that the probiotics were causing a toxic die-off of whatever flora I had in my gut. I stopped the probiotics and that stopped the symptoms. Nothing like poisoning yourself, lol. The product has over a 100K reviews on Zon that averaged 4.6. I’m going to try taking it weekly as my gut probably needs to kill off the bad flora and replace it with good flora, but not at the killing pace of a daily pill. That is more information than you might have wanted, but I’m a detective in real life.

On to other news, LONG DELAYED JUSTICE is a BookBub featured deal this Saturday. The book is free Thursday through Monday. I’ve also redone the Damian Green Boxset to include this 5th story.

Finally, I discovered a ‘new to me’ book this past week. I’m reading another book at the moment, but when I finish, I’ll start on Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series book 118, TROUBLE AT LAKE TAHOE. While my short story is more urban fantasy, I’m interested in reading Nancy’s experiences at Lake Tahoe in 1994. I read Nancy Drew books as a teenager, but those were the earliest stories in the series.

Stay cool,

Alec