Beetroot crisps and kettle descaler

Didn’t get a coffee at church as I was on prayer duty after the service.  Arrived home gasping.  Delighted to find the kettle already half full of water, I flicked the switch, made two coffees.  The milk sank straight to the bottom.  That was odd – it couldn’t be sour as I’d only bought it yesterday.  Desperate for coffee, I took a gulp. 

Uuuuugh.

Should have spat it out, not swallowed it.

Vaguely, I remembered Nigel saying something about descaling the kettle.  After the last time I drank descaler, we had an agreement that Nigel would label the kettle.  Clearly he had reneged.

I drank lots of water.  Then a bicarb solution on the grounds that it was alkaline. 

More uuuuugh.

I rang 111 hoping for some sensible first aid advice. 

Apparently now was a good time to play twenty questions.  Was I breathing fast, bleeding from anywhere, in pain?  Somebody would ring me back.  Eventually.  I was busy throwing up when they finally did.

Cindy from 111 had a very comforting voice, but my confidence was short-lived - I had to spell the name of the descaler twice while she looked it up on her poisons database.  She put me on hold for a very long time and afterwards began calling the Kilrock descaler “Kilroy”.

Then she began the same game of twenty questions again.  Half an hour had passed and I had still received no sensible advice. 

“Tell you what,” I said, “Let’s say goodbye.  I’ll ring you back if I feel worse.”

In fact she rang me back. “When I looked Kilroy up on my database, it said you should go to A & E.”

Nigel calculated by how much he had diluted the acid and we thought we could probably take a risk.

So we went for the Sunday walk we had planned.  About a mile from the car, my gut was churning  and I had to race off into the undergrowth.  One of the twenty questions had been about whether I was passing any blood.  Now I looked down aghast.

Everything was red.

As I picked my way back to the path, I was wondering how I would tell Nigel I was dying.

Then I remembered – I’d eaten beetroot crisps the night before.

Tempted to fake that I was dying anyway – that’ll teach him to descale his wife.