BBQ Brisket Illness Strikes - Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee Wisconsin

1111 North Vel R. Phillips Avenue, Milwaukee, 53203 Wisconsin, United States

I went to a bucks game with a friend. I have a unique diet, I only eat once a day, which makes it extremely easy to know exactly what caused my illness. It was half time, went to get some food, just chose the closest food concession stand it was "Smoke Shack BBQ" my friend and I both ordered the same thing and were told to wait at the other side of the counter for our food. He got his right away and a confused looking employee told me to hang on as she glanced bath and fourth between me and someone in the back kitchen area. She had a short conversation with him and walked back toward me and produced a food item that looked noticeably different than my friends and took noticeably longer to get to me, strange. But didn't think much of it and was extremely hungry given my aforementioned diet and the fact this was a night game. It was a brisket sandwich but the meat was chewy like boiled chicken or something of the like, again, strange. But I was hungry and just paid way to for much this sandwich and didn't want it to go to waste, so I ate it. Game ended, went home, fell asleep, no problems. Wake up, its 4 am on a Monday and I'm sweating profusely and shaking like a leaf in the wind. I almost immediately have to use the bathroom. I get out the demons that the "Soul Shack BBQ" had nonchalantly placed into me, I'm pissed because I know it was them and I know I overpaid and the food will not match the price tag but can I at least humbly ask not be poisoned while at a sporting event in a brand new state of the art stadium. I can see several scenarios in which something like this could be expected or at least possible, like eating gas station food or something. But when you've paid for a ticket and then overpay for the concessions, you at the very least expect not to be poisoned but maybe I'm just naive. So I crawl back into my bed, the sun greeting me in a similar manner in which I have greeted my toilet this morning. Piercing through my blinds as it overcomes the horizon, please feel free to interpret that metaphor how you wish. I close my eyes hoping for some reprieve to come to me and my bowels before waking up to my alarm to begin the work week. As I lay there I curse the name "Smoke Shack BBQ". But I try to let my mind drift in my naive attempt to get some rest. My body and "Smoke Shack BBQ" have different plans in store for me today, this week and quite frankly the rest of my life. I'm instantly fighting to stay in bed, I try to relax in this moment of distress but "Smoke Shack BBQ" beckons me back to the toilet, like the bells ringing from the a church during a funeral, reverberating in my head as I attempt to bargain for a just another minute of laying down in my bed, but the bells keep ringing. I march to the toilet again in frustration. I originally thought okay maybe some diarrhea, nausea, but Ill be back on my feet, oh boy was I wrong. For the next 6 hours, this cycle repeats, rejecting everything that is already in my body and anything that I attempt to put into it, sometimes from one end, but most of the time from both. As the hours pass by and the fingers on the clock pull against the rhythm of time with the cadence of a mentally ill man on a drum set, my body slowly but surely weakens. I continuously sweat, whether I'm shaking cold or uncomfortably hot, like sap from a pine it oozes through every pore in my body, profusely as if my other holes weren't working hard enough already. And boy oh boy trust me they were. It's now 10 am, I'm at my limit. I make myself slowly sip water as my body begs to be rehydrated but my mind is wiser to it, even in this state, I know what's happened to everything that's entered me since the "Smoke Shack BBQ" cursed me with whatever is inflicting my mortal body. But even with my body being this weak, overworked, and dehydrated, the small amounts of water I do consume are being rejected, within minutes. Around 10 am during one of my battles on the toilet during this long long war I get up from what was once my throne and expect to see the pale brown water that my bowel movements have been reduced to at this point but instead I see something much worse. My toilet bowl has taken on a shade of stark red, blood red to be precise. Believe me I already felt horrible but this causes a shift within my already rattled consciousness, I go from "Come on, just get through this, you'll be fine" to "What is happening to me? Do I need to go to the ER?". At this point in my story I feel like its important to inform whoever ends up reading this that I am a healthy and active 25 year old male with no diagnosed health conditions and am on no medication what so ever. All that's happened to me is that I went to a bucks game, was hungry and I ate from the "Smoke Shack BBQ" and now less than 24 hours after, I lay on the cold bathroom floor, contemplating, whether I need to go to urgent care or to the ER. I'm currently alone, so, I call my mom who works as a nurse and ask her what to do, she says something along the lines of "its just food poisoning, you'll be fine" a sentiment I'd normally agree with but the blood in my toilet has changed my tune. I decide that urgent care is my best bet, things are clearly only getting worse at this point without help. I prop myself off the floor with the strength I have left and go to grab my keys. Each step is thought out and planned, like thinking of the best possible route to the gas station once that low fuel light turns on. I make it to the stairs which I need to go up to make it to the garage, as I stand at the bottom and look up they begin to spin and I realize that my body is so deprived of nutrients that something as simple as going up a flight of stairs has become an impossible task. Sure I could try to crawl my way up, but should I really expect to make it to my car and be able to drive myself safely to the urgent care? And on that note, urgent care? I can no longer walk up a flight of stairs, I need to go to the ER. If I don't I'm going to pass out, and then what? I need to get help while I have the mental capacity to do so. I call my mom again, she's always been a rub some dirt on it type of person so it takes some convincing but when I tell her I cant make it up the steps she's convinced and on her way. It takes her 20 or so minutes to arrive, every minute waiting spent in grueling agony with no hope of reprieve short of losing consciousness, I can't drink, I can't walk, all I can do is wait while the knife that is the pain in my stomach drives deeper into abdomen. Finally she arrives, I'm 6 foot 225 and my mom is 5'4, even with her help, in my current state it is a fight to get me up the stairs and into her car. She speeds the entire drive, keeping it at 20 over the limit at minimum, I hate to make my own mother worry like this but I cant help but to groan, in the midst of my suffering. We arrive at the hospital and I rush to get out of the car, I'm barley in control of my own body at this point but stumble towards the the entrance of the ER as fast as I can. I can tell my mom is worried, I've never been hurt or sick like this so as we approach the entrance and I see the wheelchairs just beyond the glass doors I joke and say that she's going to need to push me around on a wheelchair. We laugh but the moment soon makes a violent turn back towards the seriousness of the situation, she's helping me walk towards the entrance but before we can make it there my knees become weak and I've lost all control, my legs cant fight against the pavement anymore and I collapse, just a couple of feet from the doors. I'm still conscious but barley, my mom retrieves a wheelchair from inside the entrance turning the moment of levity we just had into some type of sick joke, playing on the heart strings of my poor worried mother, the type of joke that could only be casted upon us by an organization as despicable and abhorrently disgusting as "Smoke Shack BBQ" and the arena that chooses to host them, fiserv forum. The next 10-30 minutes are a blur, I'm in and out of consciousness as my mother argues with hospital staff to grant me care as soon as possible as I'm wheeled through the hallways of a hospital I've never been to. The next thing I can concretely remember is the nurse repeatedly asking me the same question. I'm still so weak that I need to push on the wheels of my mind like Sisyphus to muster enough thought to answer but before I can my brain registers that I'm in a hospital bed with people swarming around me while tubes are being fed into my arm, I'm not sure what it is but thank fucking christ I'm in a hospital so I know that "The Smoke Shack BBQ" and fiserv forum couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. My mind turns back to the nurse as the same question is asked again . She's asking if I've done any drugs. I relay to her the same story I've relayed here, in less words, my mind coming back to me as I go but the pain remains and I figure its the IV drip that's given me the strength to regain my train of thought. Again because of the pain and agony I'm in and the work its done to my body the next hour or two for me is foggy. One thing I do remember is the nurses repeatedly asking if I've done any drugs or questions that aimed to see if I have any underlying undiagnosed medical conditions. At the time I paid it no second thought, I didn't care about anything except getting better, but upon reflection it makes sense. You have a perfectly healthy 25 year old male who yesterday was just fine, no health conditions what so ever, and the tests results that are coming in suggest I am on the verge of death surely drugs or some medical condition is the only possible conventional explanation. Forget what this half conscious idiot is mumbling about eating, there's no way that could explain the current state of things, a notion I would whole heartedly agree with without a second thought if I was medical professional in the room with them and not laying on the table. But ladies and gentleman of the iwaspoisned.com jury make no mistake, the sole culprit in the makings of my current condition lye with "Smoke Shack BBQ" and "Smoke Shack BBQ" alone. Of course the institution propping them up, fiserv forum arena had their role to play as well of course. And looking back at the strange nature of how my food order was handled, I do place blame on the employees as well and often ponder on why I alone and not my friend was selected to be poisoned that day. A thought experiment that only fuels the embers of anger burning within me when thinking back to that day, but at last an unproductive thought experiment it is. Now back to my story where the only thing burning is in my stomach, where currently whatever ungodly bacteria that was besmirched upon my stomach by the fine employees of "Smoke Shack BBQ" is doing its very best to kill me. The doctors and nurses treating me at this point are undoubtedly confused and bewildered by my current condition and thus run all different types of test on me to try to figure out what's happening. They even do an MRI scan, shortly after I'm moved to a different room and new tubes are put into my arm. Now I'm no medical professional but from what I can gather looking back on it now, there was nothing underlying wrong with me at all, except for the fact that I chose to eat "Smoke Shack BBQ". The food they served had given me an illness so rancid that as it ran its course through me it tore a hole in my small bowel, thus resulting in the blood in my toilet. The "Smoke Shack BBQ" had taken a perfectly healthy young man and brought him to the verge of death. The doctors said if I hadn't come to the hospital I would have died. My blood tests came back so out of whack and I was so dangerously dehydrated they decided I should stay in the ICU. I was moved there because of the state I was in but also in part because of the peculiar nature of my case, even for the staff of the ER and ICU it was hard to believe that my story, simple as it was, could be the sole cause of this. So for the next two days I was monitored to assure I wouldn't return to that state. During this time a number of test were done to try to rule out anything else could have contributed to this. Nothing else was found and believe me I was hoping something would be found. Id rather live in a world where somethings wrong with me that can be fixed and medicated rather than one were I can be poisoned and nearly killed for the crime of attending a basketball game. But nothing was wrong with me, the only answer I got is that the "Smoke Shack BBQ" had concocted and poisoned me with a bacteria so potent I nearly died. Its been about a year since that day and I'm not going to lie I'm mostly writing this as a cathartic exercise to try and help with the trauma I deal with everyday. I know some of you reading this might find that last statement or all of this to be dramatic and that's perfectly fine. Just know I truly do live every day differently now, I stopped eating out, I cut certain things out of my diet completely, I stopped drinking and I certainly haven't been back to that place since then and certainty haven't had brisket since. Which was previously one of my favorite foods as I'm sure it is for many of you who take your time to read this. In my opinion the worst part of all of this for me and I assume for whoever reads this, is that at any time you are given or buy food or beverage is that if at any point it was handled by someone else you could die. No matter how old you are, how healthy you are, or how careful you are, you could die. Because one day you could be like me and commit the crime of doing something so innocently human, become hungry in public. Originations like the "Smoke Shack BBQ" and fiserv forum who I personally would have never questioned, operate with a menacing negligence to human life and handle food preparation like my toilet handled my endless vomiting, blood, and diarrhea, or in other words.... not well. Its a blatant disregard for human life in an arena that holds 17,000 people on a regular basis. So to those who find my previous statements dramatic, if it happened to me it could happen to you and if it did, Id hope you could go back to living life normally, my relationship with food has changed on a fundamental level, every meal thought of completely differently than I had before, a calculated risk and I increase my odds by doing everything in my power to remain as healthy as possible to lessen the blow if anything like this were to happen to me again. So again, if it happened to you I hope you could go back, but if you experience the agony I did, see the fear in the eyes of your own mother, the confused looks from medical professionals as you lay there dying, your own strength ripped away from you until you cant walk through the doors of the hospital, all taken from you by a concessions employee, if you experienced what I did, I doubt you'd live your life the same again, but like I said I would hope you would because I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. All this and I didn't even mention that the medical expenses cost me over $6000. So if you choose to go to fiserv forum for a concert or bucks game (wouldn't recommend) don't eat there. If you have to, definitely don't eat from the "Smoke Shack BBQ". But if you're really hankering for some BBQ don't order the brisket sandwich. You could literally die. But if you like to live life in the fast lane or as I like to call it, down right suicidal and you decide to eat from there or maybe you just walk by it during half time of the bucks game please let me know if you can hear the bells. The same ones I heard in the early morn as the sun crestened on the horizon and they beckoned me back into my bathroom. As I write this and think of the evil being brewed in that hellish establishment I can still hear them ringing, a constant reminder of the pain from my near death experience. Maybe its just in the back of my head, a permanent scar left in my mind by the trauma of my experience. Or maybe its real, maybe it beckons for you to. Don't listen, whatever you do, don't listen. | Symptoms: Nausea, Diarrhea, Vomiting, Stomach Pain, Fever, Cramps, Chills, Sweating, Gas, Shaking, Dehydration, Weakness, Bloody Stool