Cause: unknown

The computer screen in front of me has finally stopped tilting slowly on its side.  I can now walk down the hall in nearly a straight line without bumping into any walls, which means that the floor also appears to have returned to a state of being level with the earth's surface. A slight pulsation in my frontal lobe remains, but the nausea has excused itself from all but the most extreme fringes of my consciousness.

At my first attempt to get out of bed this morning, I felt like I had been sleeping on a Merry-Go-Round in motion.  I made my way toward my daughter's voice by holding the edge of my bed and stumbling into walls--it reminded me of precisely the way my husband and I found our cruise ship cabin the night we traveled in open ocean. In addition to the dizzyness I felt generally ill, but thankfully was able to circumvent the wretched experience of vomiting.

After my brother-in-law picked up Madelyn for school, I promptly zig-zagged my way back down the hall and under my covers and slept almost the entire time she was gone. This is the kind of frivolous luxury I normally dream of indulging in--however under different circumstances. And even though it would not have been an option to forgo today's return to bed, I am still irritated at the loss of precious time to be productive.

I have never experienced malfunctioning equilibrium with a "sick" germ. It was not until I was swaying around the kitchen trying to throw together some leftovers for lunch that I made the eerie realization that I was suffering from a terrible hangover. The mystery emerges, then, in the fact that I didn't go near a drop of alcohol last night.

There is one possible culprit that I thought of almost immediately after my 6:45am forage into the dark, spinning carnival ride that is my house. I almost knocked the evidence off of my nightstand on my tipsy way out of the bedroom. An empty glass. It had been resting on that nightstand for several days. Many days. Perhaps even more than a week. Only it was not empty until last night, when I decided on a whim to gulp those two last swallows of water. The water that had been mocking me for days, having so long escaped my usual fixation with tidiness and order in my living quarters.

I drank it quickly, and regret filled my body before the glass parted with my lips. Such a vile, stale taste: pennies, cardboard, mushrooms, lysol. Yuck. And then, evidently, I didn't even give myself the satisfaction of putting the empty glass in the kitchen.

Do you think stagnant filtered water--or something flourishing inside it--could have made me sick?