If you’ve ever read a warning label and thought “what idiot prompted the need for this?!,” it may have been me.
As fate would have it, I have accidentally poisoned myself not just once, but twice.
The first time was eons ago and a little less dramatic. I was at work at ye olde bank in Red Bluff and noticed I was feeling very off. In talking to my coworker, whose husband is an ag chemical expert we established that fertilizing one’s lawn while barefoot can lead to transdermal exposure to harmful substances. I’m sure the fertilizer people didn’t think to add that as a warning, because who would fertilize their lawn barefoot?!
Me.
I was in a hurry that morning and classically just trying to get one more thing done before I headed out to work. I was probably trying to avoid marring my Payless Shoe Source pumps and well,… got a little poisoned as a result.
The second time I poisoned myself was in 2022, a time when I should have possessed a level of maturity and knowledge to prevent such actions.
In the bodybuilding things, it’s common to be gifted swag. Free shirts, supplements, shaker bottles, etc. are common. I’d had one such swag bag in my clutches. There were some great scores, vitamin C, taurine, BCAA’s, and a bag of zinc oxide powder.
You may already see where this is going, but I didn’t.
I looked up the zinc. Mostly, anyways.
Zinc is good for you. It supports your immune system, lowers inflammation, keeps your brain healthy. That’s all good stuff.
So, in the free shaker it went. I had my first sip before my car got out of my neighborhood. It tasted off, but,….gains! So I continued consumption until I got to the gym about 15 minutes later.
I was only in my second set of exercise before alarm bells screamed in my head, “MAYDAY! MAYDAY”
I ran to the bathroom barely making it in time to violently vomit in the bathroom trash. I’m not a barfer. This does not happen to me.
There was an immediate and reacherous drive home included stops that would have helped people fill out their commuter bingo card of things to see.
I was mercilessly ill the next several hours. So ill I couldn’t even look up web md (bwah!) My body has never before so forcibly expelled anything. It was more barbaric that an exorcism. I was glued to the bathroom floor and later learned that my guts were so impacted that I got petechiae bruising on my c-section scar from so much pressure from the spasms.
But then just as instantly as it came on, it stopped. I ate (!!!) and went straight to the Dr. Google to see what way in which I was dying now.
Some clicky-clicky and yada yada yada; zinc OXIDE is NOT good for ingestion. Zinc oxide is used to make sunscreen. Sunscreen is not for drinking.
You may be like me, asking yourself why a company would give a bag of powder for making sunscreen to bodybuilding competitors. Maybe they were thinking this would be like the sourdough starter trend or something. I don’t really know. But I do know that in looking up the company and the product, there had been a rather significant change in packaging from what I was given as to what was sold presently: “For External Use Only.” Thanks Supplement Company. Little too late for me, but thanks nonetheless.
So in short, don’t drink sunscreen. I’m thankful that our bodies are programmed to immediately thrust out things that aren’t supposed to be in them. I’m also thankful that I have other data points in my life to let me know that I’m not a complete moron for poisoning myself. Twice.
Thanks for reading!
Bifocals and Barbells 